A swell top ten list for the new lazy gardener

Upon finishing up the second addendum to the last post, I went outside and sat in front of the garden, thinking about how uncomfortable I felt. "What is it I'm feeling?", I wondered. It took but a moment for the answer to come, in the form of an admonition: "Don't get a swelled head."

This is what I was always told when I took credit for anything, gave myself a compliment or received one from somebody else. My mother said it, my grandmother said it and my father said it, too. Three adults who played a major role in my life were telling me the same thing. You better not think too highly of yourself or you will become an asshole, or at least that how this young girl heard those words. What else was I to think? I knew my head wasn't going to literally swell up like a balloon, of course. They weren't going to tell me, directly, that I shouldn't have good thoughts about myself, but this old saw about the swelled head was an easy phrase to let fall off ones tongue. In my grandmother's time there were folks called "swells" who were rich and full of themselves, and I suppose that's where the expression came from. Tonight, I do not feel like googling it and finding out the exact etymology of this expression. I just feel like whining a little bit about being force fed with messages extolling the dangers of having any self esteem when I was a kid. I didn't have any. Thanks a lot, folks.

Okay, now that I've gotten that out of my system. Here is Julie's list of rules for a budding lazy gardener. It took me years to come to these conclusions, not a lot of gardening, but some, and a lot of reading, so listen up:

1. Don't mess about with plants that are not fit to grow in your zone. Know what your zone is. Be aware that there are also "micro-climates", such as the town that I live in, where it is generally ten degrees colder than every town around it. I won't even bother to grow lavender here, as much as I adore it, for it's too much of a risk, whereas it isn't at all just three miles down the road.

2. If there is a garden in the town you live in that you like, find out what grows in it. If they use a gardening service, skip it. If the garden is an old one, seriously try to find out what's in it. Old plants are successful plants.

3. Don't grow persnickety plants. If a plant has very specific needs, that means you will have to attend to it frequently. It also means that other plants may get overlooked.

4. Don't believe everything you read or hear. I did a semi-controlled experiment with two clematis plants (which are terribly needy and I gave up on). I planted one exactly as specified by the gardening center (which is a big red flag that this is a plant that needs coddling). I planted the other in a haphazard way. The second one did better. Neither of them did very well.

5. On the other hand, make it a point to buy a few plants from the oldest and best garden center in your area. Ask the oldest person there what plants do well and let them talk as much as they want. You'll learn a lot. And it's worth every single extra penny you spend over buying the same plants at the Walmart garden center.

6. If it needs full sun, it needs full sun. It it needs shade, it needs shade. Believe it. Don't wish it were otherwise.

7. Plant flowers that have the same soil requirements in the same bed. Or better yet, just plant flowers that don't have very specific soil requirements, like catmint, which will grow in just about everything and is beautiful.

8. Choose plants that have beautiful foliage. This is what you'll see most of the time. Plant a few plants for their flowers alone.
Unfortunately, most books and catalogs only show pictures of the flowers. Visit garden centers to see the plants in person before you make any decisions.

9. Don't take it too seriously. It's not food.

10. If at first it doesn't succeed, forget about it.

Art note: What image to use for this post? I was at a loss. Then, the idea of laziness, and the Absinthe Drinkers, by Degas, came to mind. What would be nicer than admiring your garden while sitting down with a nice cold glass of absinthe? Actually, I wouldn't know, for I've never had absinthe, but it sounds nice.

Instead, I found a painting, by Picassso, above, by the same name (without the s, for it is singular). I have never been a fan of Picasso. For some reason, knowing he was a complete jerk colored my opinion of him from an early age and I bet he had a terribly swelled head. But seriously, I find a good deal of his work to be murky, muddy and not terribly interesting. This one surprised me. Too bad he's one of the few artists that non-artists know of. This is not to say he wasn't masterful. He was, in many different styles.

Evolution of a gardener, part three

This afternoon, Dick and I perused the garden, which essentially means walking in a straight line from point A to point B. Unlike the garden I created at my last house, this one does not wander anywhere. However, I have decided that this garden is an unabashed success and one reason I do so is because of the minor tiff Dick and I had over it after we sat down.

It is almost everything I've ever wanted in a flower garden. It has a good variety (though, of course, I want more), a good mix of bloom times and, most importantly, it is neither too formal nor too messy. It errs on the messy side, I must admit, but this is where it succeeds, I believe. It does not look planned nor does it look like any one put any work into it. I haven't put much work into it. It is my lazy garden and it works for me.

What our minor tiff was over is just how much work I did put into the garden. Dick thought it was minimal, at best. There was a lovely garden in this spot before, and it did have a stone wall in the front of it, but when the house was sold to me, the garden was destroyed by a bulldozer that was brought in to install a new septic system. It was supposed to be put back properly, but it was not. It was a rush job, finished not more than an hour or so before I sat down with lawyers and signed some papers. The stone wall was a mess, the flowers were all upturned and thrown back in piles and I knew it was unlikely we would see much bloom come Spring. It was October.

Some flowers did survive this upheaval and Dick did some rearranging of the stone wall. A truly magnificent hosta bloomed the first spring (last year) along with three perfectly healthy Lady's Mantle, both plants I had never fully appreciated before. Two other cultivars of hosta emerged, but only barely and the garden was overrun by violets and dead nettle. It still is, but I enjoy both tremendously. The dead nettle is easy to pull out, as it is shallow rooted, but the violets are really a bane to the existence of every thing else and I should do something about them.

But every thing else, I planted. It doesn't look it. It looks like an old garden, which is both fortuitous and a ruse. It is precisely because I am a lazy gardener that it looks this way. By leaving the violets and the dead nettle and a myriad of weeds I don't know the names of, but are actually pretty (I mean, who decided they were weeds, anyway?) I have created a garden that looks like it happened by accident. It most certainly did not.

I planted a very old fashioned bleeding heart which, of course, looks like it could have been here since the house was first built in 1850 (but surely it would have died off by now). I put in many cultivars of astilbe, and planted them rather haphazardly, so they look like they just happened to spring up here and there, as they please. This happened accidentally with some bargain bulbs I purchased at Marden's (Maine's crazy bargain store). The bulbs were rotten and, so, I got about three dozen or so for three bucks, as I recall. The bags read "Stargazer Lilies" and some of them did bloom last year, rather a surprise to me, and this year we've got dozen upon dozens of them plus some completely unknown lily to boot. I can't wait to see what it is. I planted hardy geraniums of many different varieties, one of which has grown like wild fire. It looks like it grows between the violets, which it does not, but the effect is lush and thick and truly wonderful. I bought some other bargain plants at Reny's (Maine's other not too crazy close-out store) which did not bloom at all last year, but have this year, and I have no idea what these plants are. I found the remnants of an old garden in the far back of my yard, which was leggy and sad on account of deep shade and brought those plants down just this Spring. They are doing fabulously: sedum (two different kinds, I think), a bit of columbine (which I keep pulling out, thinking it's a bad weed, and I should know this by now) and black cohosh.

There's more in this garden than I'm letting on, for as I said, I don't even know what it is. I did buy both catmint and bee balm at a garden center and they both are doing very well, as they are easy to grow plants (unless your bee balm gets powdery mildew, like mine did in my first garden, and I never conquered it). Now I think I know better; I've planted it not in the middle of the garden, but at the outer edge, where it can get plenty of air circulation. The plants that do get mildewed no matter where you put them (pulmonaria, for example), I've pulled out. Some of them are coming back in little patches and they are pretty plants, but here's the thing: I don't care what they look like. If they are a problem, I let them die. This is the secret I have learned. I have no desire to coddle my flowers. I do not enjoy weeding, spraying, picking off bugs or figuring out any garden problems. I want to do what I did this afternoon; simply watch the flowers grow. If I can throw 'em in and they survive, all is well. I'll pull out the occasional dandelion (which is a bad weed) and I'll pull out grass. I'll pull out obvious problems, like the small maple trees that are starting to grow, but otherwise, it's survival of the fittest in my garden, and that is the lesson I have learned. I love it. It's beautiful. It looks like it just created itself and for that I may have an occasional fight with someone when I take any credit, but some credit is due. But really, not too much. The flowers are doing all the work for me. I only made way for them.

Photo note: Pulmonaria. The perfect color to hide powdery mildew. If you like silvery mounds of foliage, spend the money on a good hosta or a mounding artemesia.

Addendum: I can not take credit for the absolutely heavenly peony that grows in the back of the yard under a tree planted by the last owner's son when he was a young boy, making it about 30 years old or so. I suspect that the peony is the same age. It is spectacular, and I promise to take a photo and post it when it blooms. I feel I should name this plant after the young boy whose tree it graces, Colin, but since I couldn't even bring myself to name my sheep when I had them, I will not start naming plants. They are not mine. They belong to nature.

Second addendum: For honesty's sake, I will name some plants that did grow last year that I had forgotten: Thread leaf coreopsis, a beautiful airy plant that looks like a miniature forest before bloomiing, which I planted more of for balance. Batchelor's buttons, which look lovely when blooming, which means a few days, and horrible the rest of the time. I waver every year as to whether to pull them out or not. Last year I did, This year I did not. One hardy geranium, probably "Johnson's blue". Hardy geraniums rule! Two stands of Japanese irises, which have not bloomed either year. Instead of dividing, I planted one new corm and this year it has yielded at least a dozen new delicate blooms. And lastly, over one hundred daffodils that are packed so tightly that only twenty or so of them have bloomed. I need to divide and conquer these, an exception to my lazy rule.

The evolution of a gardener - parts one and two

Here in this part of Maine, the trees have finally leafed out. Our growing season is so short, one can practically blink and it's over and snowing once again. At this moment, our heater is on. It is damp and cold, but I'm looking out the window and it's deeply green, at long last, and the flowering trees and bushes are putting on a lovely display of bright whites that gleam like strands of miniature christmas lights. This season is much too brief, to be sure, but perhaps that's what makes it all the more beautiful. I find the growing season, at times, to be a bit sad, but then, too, everything grows like mad here. One can imagine sitting down and actually watching the plants gain an inch in an hour, if one paid attention. It certainly seems so. I still think it's possible with american bamboo.

My first foray in gardening was something of a disaster. My neighbor and I decided that we wanted to grow vegetables. Oddly, what I remember most about this first foray into gardening was the difficulty of obtaining anything to garden with. My friend and I walked many miles to the older part of town. Perhaps I remember this well, for we were both small girls and we walked at least three miles carrying bags of manure, which is not a light load. I would venture to guess that this endeavor (including manure) was due to my fascination with the "back to the land" movement and the Whole Earth Catalog. I was not a child of great aspirations; reducing life to its basics seemed a great idea to me.

As my mother thought vegetable gardening not the greatest aesthetic choice, I was asked to plant my vegetables on the side of the house that no one ever saw, which I complied with, of course. Looking back, I'm surprised that she okayed this project at all. She was never keen on anything that wasn't her idea or excited her own sensibilities. But these were the years in which my parents were plainly miserable and so, for the most part, I was left to my own devices.

So, I planted from seed, not knowing the first thing about it. Not many came up and the ones that did, well, I didn't even know what they were, for I had not marked the plants. I don't remember weeding or doing anything at all except watching. I came of age in a time when everything was instant - coffee, mashed potatoes in a box, frozen food and pop tarts - it was the seventies, after all, and waiting for a raw vegetable seemed totally anachronistic. I find it interesting to think that in some ways we were, as a culture, more impatient back then, for now we live in the age of the Web and reading reviews of technology always includes bench tests of how fast the things are. I have a "slow" scanner, which - horrors! - takes forty to fifty seconds to scan (for which it was only rated three out of five stars, as if less than a minute is some kind of crime).

But, in other things, I believe we have slowed down. Perhaps this is due to technology itself, and our need to feel human in the face of it. I have thought that repeatedly when I've ruminated on the popularity of hand-knitting and home cooking with fresh ingredients. When a decent home computer can beat the world's greater chess master, it's time for us to engage in activities that computers can't top us on, and no computer can plant a seed (I don't think) or make even a decent aesthetic decision.

So, back to my side-of-house garden sometime in the early seventies. Eventually, some zucchinis did show themselves. I was not thrilled, for I didn't like zucchinis and I still don't. But I was amazed. I had actually put some seeds in the earth (and probably thrown some manure on for good measure) and there it was: food. Maybe not for for me, but someone would probably like a zucchini or two. They got bigger and bigger and I figured I'd wait until they were at least the size of a cucumber (which I did like) until I picked them. This was a mistake, for they were eaten by animals. Every last one of them.

And that was the end of my gardening hobby.

Yet, I continued to fantasize about gardening throughout my life. I remember spending hours and hours, in my dark apartment on Horatio Street, an apartment that totally denied the existence of a real world by facing only an airshaft, leafing through a huge Reader's Digest book of flower gardening. This book was enchanting, with both lovely drawings and nice photographs of every conceivable flower. I followed the lead of an old friend of mine, by subscribing to Horticulture magazine, of all things. My friend lived in a dive in the East Village with a toilet and bathtub in the kitchen. He surrounded both with beautiful curtains and a friendly stack of magazines next to the john. It was there I discovered even finer points of high end gardening, in that magazine, which it is absurd to think we both subscribed to, living in Manhattan, with not even a community garden plot to either of our names. But in the gardens of our imaginations, I believe for both of us, we envisioned minor Versailles or at least a charming British cottage garden (and no bugs or late frosts could invade these gardens of our minds).

The second garden I planted was both a wonderful success and a dismal failure. I lived, for a time, in eastern Long Island, in a neighborhood where every one, it seemed, except for I, used a lawn service. This meant that every day some one somewhere had little white flags with a skull and crossbones on them surrounding their lawn. This meant, of course, pesticides were just sprayed, and keep off. The yards were all perfect turf with a bunch of azaleas. I still find it hard to appreciate azaleas.

The thing was, being the only one who didn't spray my lawn or garden, every bug conceivable congregated at my house. I'm sure of it. Now that I've been gardening for years, I see that the problems I had with bugs back then was completely outside of normal. If there was a bug that attacked something, no matter how rare or improbably it was, it came and ate the plants. The act of gardening itself was near disgusting because of this. Sow bugs (or potato bugs) were in an abundance that was stunning. I've never like these critters on the best of days, but when thousands of them are eating your flowers, well, I came to absolutely loathe them.

I also came to loathe lawn itself (which I've changed my mind on) for it was so emblematic of keeping up appearances. And I wasn't happy the day a new neighbor came over to ask me if I could cut her lawn. Out there mowing, in a white t-shirt and jeans, she thought I was the lawn boy. Yes, I had a crew cut, but didn't she (or her mawkish daughter) notice the 36D boobs? I felt like asking her that, but I kept mum. I only responded with a weak, "I own this house." Well, that wasn't really true. As true for most Americans, the bank owned the house, and that became abundantly obvious when they foreclosed on me.

So, the bugs ate most of the flowers and I wrestled daily and diligently removing the front lawn with a sharp spade (which is an arduous and slow task). However, my herb garden was moving along nicely. It smelled glorious. It wasn't much to look at, so I started thinking of it as a garden for the blind. It was wonderful bringing people outside to handle the flowers, not actually see them, and then smell their fingers. And as a goodly amount of the plants (lavender, artemesia, to name a few) were a ghostly grayish green, they looked beautiful by moonlight.

As I think about the gardens that were to come, I realize there have been more than I originally thought. I am stunned to realize I had completely forgotten the quarter of an acre garden I tried to manage for two years when I first moved to Maine. And so, since this gardening history is quite a bit larger than I originally thought, this entry is only the beginning of a longer narrative. To be continued. . .

Photo note: My garden, last year on June 19. I should remember to take another photo on the same day this year to contrast and compare. Someone please remind me!

More purple

In a recent post I reported that I've had a lifelong hatred of the color purple. Today, as I was gazing out the window onto my garden, I realized I was dead wrong. Cascades of beautiful purple flowers are blooming profusely around my deck and down the side of the stones that separate my perennials from the grass. This same flower, Dead Nettle (lamium maculatum) grows crazy wild around the sloppy compost piles at the edge of the woods, beyond any areas where I try to tame nature. It's a gorgeous plant that blooms both in the early spring and in the fall. But be careful if you use it. Saying it's invasive would be an understatement. Thankfully, it's shallow rooted and easy to remove (and transplant).

I adore purple flowers. In fact, I love purple flowers so much that I have to force myself, when considering new plants, to keep from buying more purple ones. Right now, lilacs are starting to bloom all over Maine (though I haven't seen any as short and manicured as in this photograph.)


I have dreamt of lavender fields after seeing photographs such as this (Grasse, France):


I can not even begin to imagine what it smells like to stand in this field.

Clematis is another stunner which comes in many shades of purple (though I've had no luck at all growing it):


How could I even think I hated purple?

Somehow, taking purple out of the garden ruined the color for me, to the point that I didn't even think of the lilacs, lavenders, salvias, catmint, hardy geraniums, (the list goes on and on) as purple.

Consider this story: My mother owned a clothing store. It was knd of "hippie-ish" or "artsy", depending on how you saw it. In 1984, after her death, I took over the store. I considered, seriously, the discontinuation of selling any purple clothes. But the women who worked there before I came along stopped me. In fact, they cautioned me that there were customers who came in specifically for purple clothes. One of them we called "the purple lady".

This woman was a schoolteacher. Everything she wore was purple. Everything. Always. She must have worked hard to find all this purple stuff. Besides her sweaters, skirts, pants, blouses and dresses, she wore purple shoes and stockings (and of course, scarves, hats and any other accessories that don't immediately come to mind). She wore purple eyeliner, eyeshadow, lipstick and nail color. She carried a purple bag which held a purple checkbook with, you guessed it, purple checks. And she signed those checks with a purple pen. She had a purple car (of what make and model I have no idea). And so, whenever anything whatsoever arrived with the UPS truck that was purple, we would give her a call.

One time she came in with her teenage daughter. They shopped and the daughter whined, "Oh no, Mom, not that! It's purple!" I felt for her, being the daughter of the Purple Lady. I tried not to think of what the interior of her home looked like. What a way to grow up (though of course, there are worse upbringings than being subjected to a single color palette).

She was a kook who was defined by a color. And everything in me, at the age of twenty six, wanted to put an end to this nonsense by stopping the supply of purple clothes. It was tempting, but I did not do it.

The truth is, I was once rather afraid of any color at all. Once I gave up using crayons, I stuck with pencil and pen and left colors behind. When I got to art school, I did not know how to paint. It had never interested me for it involved color (though a more imaginative me might have endeavored to use a black and white palette). I had such trouble in my first year of painting simply because I was overwhelmed by it. There were too many! The tubes of paint were endless - how could I pick even that, never mind paint with them?!

I wound up in a remedial painting class (not their description, but it was apt). We used a limited palette: Black, white and the three primary colors. Somehow mixing my own made me less nervous.

In the garden, nowadays, I have to treat purple like I once treated black. Use less of it. See, I'm actually a purple freak! Last year I planted the first yellow flowers ever. I started, tentatively, with some white ones (wow, how terribly daring of me!) I've thrown in some pinks, dusky reds and magentas. I'm near to a full spectrum of color. But the predominant one is purple. Ha!

Photo note:My desktop is filled with photographs of purple flowers and I could post hundreds. For more, visit Wayside Gardens or any number of gardening sites.