The Ease of Coneflowers, or Gardening's Dirty Secret

Post 5

Hey, most of gardening's secrets are dirty; it goes with the territory. Yields good results though.

Coneflowers with Red Maple

The big secret?  It's that very few people garden the way garden writers tell us to garden. We are told to learn about plants, prepare our soil and design a garden before putting a single plant in. We are told to hire experts or buy garden design plans . This message sometimes suggests that gardening is a dangerous activity apt to blow up in the unempowered novice's face.

GardenDesign

Well, people seem to really like my garden and I've never hired anyone or used any plans. I also knew very little when I plunged in. Most people know very little when they plunge in.

This is how it worked --I hated my new front yard's sickly grass even more than I hated its boring pachysandra. So I thinned out some of the pachysandra, and transplanted it to where I'd dug up grass. Then something inside of me felt an irrational tug, a temptation towards lights, colors, action! Friends of mine had flower gardens, why, why...not me? So, inspired, determined and deluded, I tromped off to the nearest box store to buy cheap flats of annuals. I put them in. Instant pizzazz. Positive feedback. I was hooked.

Coneflowers, Phloxes, Rose, Verbascum, Petunias

Now here is where friends and family came in. They offered me plants, not just the annuals of a summer but hardy perennials that came back every year. They gave me advice and encouragement. I learned where to put things. I learned to water. Bought perennials on sale. Took out library books on plants. Played around on the Internet and discovered a haven of good advice, Garden Web.


Piecemeal, it all came together. When I saw something I liked, I bought it and put it in where I had space. If it didn't look right I moved it or divided it. Sometimes I killed it by mistake, learning as I went. But after a few years-- there was not a bit of pachysandra or grass left.



Coneflowers and Daylilies



Your best design tool is your eyes. Just keep looking as you go. When things don't look right, change them till they do, till your gaze feels drawn in, welcome, happy to rest amidst the abundance. Its not rocket science; its gardening. So, if you don't much mind the exercise, or being outside in gorgeous weather or delicious smells or the feeling of cooperating with nature, you will look up one day while gardening and find that-- you have made yourself a garden.

So the dirty secret is that garden-making is not difficult. It is as if nature wants to cooperate, is happy to do the hard work for you. Non-perfectionist gardening is like one of the easiest, prettiest plants around: coneflowers.  They are the pink, daisy like flower in all the garden pictures.  And all they want to do is grow.

And if you do not believe me about making gardening easy, then believe these Handy Tips by Felder Rushing from his helpful new book, Slow Gardening

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Coneflower, or Echinachea purpurea, is native to American prairies and so likes sun, good drainage and moderate water. However, it is a sturdy, highly adaptable plant; it will also take part shade and amended clay soil, but not damp soil. It has a good 6 weeks of bloom, usually from early to late summer, and, contrary to its Latin color name, is usually a lavender pink ,with a fat russetty domed center (that does look like a curled up hedgehog aka, in Greek, echinos.) It is easily divided, self seeds readily and can handily be grown from seed as long as the seeds have a period of cold. Because it is so hard to kill and because to have some coneflower means to soon have more coneflower, it is a perfect pass along plant, a good gift to a new gardener. There are many fancy varieties in wonderful colors: white, red, orange, magenta, yellow, bicolor and green, but they are less likely to seed or spread. Usually two feet tall , and with many 4 inch flowers on just one plant, it is a useful, easy, beautiful addition to most gardens. And , as a bonus, goldfinches seek out its seedheads for feasting. For information on its possible medical properties, go here 

Mistakes, or the Misplaced Butterfly Bush

Post 4

Mistakes: you will make them.

Can you spot it? It's that blobitity lump of silver-green smack in the middle front. A Butterfly Bush I was deluded enough to think would stay small. It didn't, ruining an otherwise successful rock garden.  Plus, the bush's mass confuses the flow of space; instead of drawing the eye in, it pushes the gaze out. Which irks me. Part of me wants the garden to be better, perfect, a sort of garden porn. 
 
Do you see the problem here? Red myrtle, red maple and ... invasive Lythrum salicaria, aka Purple Loosestrife. In England it is a lovely, manageable garden plant.  Here it destroys rivers, clots streams and chokes wetlands. I must pull it out. Which hardly seems fair since I did not plant it. The wind and rain did. But it's my responsibility now.

The words humus, humility and human are cognate. Sometimes, as I garden, it feels as if humility is seeping up into me from the humus. And it feels like strength, not weakness, a beatitude of the garden.

"Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a process and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect: part of it is decaying, part nascent…And in all things there are certain inequalities and deficiencies, which, are not only sources of life but sources of beauty." Alvar Aalto

The Butterfly Bush is now in bloom, and true to its nature, it is making the butterflies very happy. It will bloom, on and off, from now till fall, when I will transplant it to a better place further back in the yard. It will still please the flutterbys, but also contribute to the overall beauty of the garden.

The beauty I want to create is a different kind of beauty than the usual, temptingly-perfect garden porn.  What I want instead, is a sensuous expression of the integrity and inter- and outer-connectiveness of a particular environment.  For me, to garden is to find and express a presence, an itness, a balance of energy and order of being, tempered to a loved and local, time and place. 

"Presence is why we love what we cannot eat or mate with... Presence matches our speed; thus it seems not flow, but all arrivals— The beginning mirrored everywhere. The true indictment. The end all through the story."  Les Murray in "Sunflowers"

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Addendum--posted the above yesterday and this morning noticed that a spider had thrown a guyline from the pink coneflowers (you can see them in the bottom pic,) to a stem at the back of the bush.  This pleases me, since around here, garden spiders are good news. They are nonpoisoness and eat mosiquitos and other pests. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

How-to: Butterfly Bush or Buddleia davidii, is hardy in our area and easy to grow. It likes sun and some water (but not bog,) will survive drought, and depending on the variety, can be anywhere from 3 to 12 feet tall. The trick is to remember to prune it in the spring, not fall, and only after you can see the beginnings of new buds. For the most blossoms, prune the stems down to about 6 inches. If, however, you want to encourage height, you will still get some bloom if you prune it up higher. It can make an attractive, overhanging backdrop to a sunny or even slightly shaded border. Besides the lavender-blue pictured above, it also comes in a wonderful dark purple, white and even some reddish and orangey shades. It is a dependable, unfussy plant, but can look awkward if badly placed (duh!) or if left undeadheaded after blooming, since numerous curly wands of brown decay can be a hard look to make work.

The Zinnias of Inspiration

Post 3



What sights make you smile?

For me it's zipping past a field of blooming zinnias at our local Maple Acres Farm. Why? It takes me back to 1960s Long Island. I'm 5 years old, in the back seat of a Mark IX Jaguar,

http://unmitigatedengland.blogspot.com/

curling sandy toes in the impossibly thick, red carpet while wondering what's taking my mom so long at the farm stand.  Salt breeze is blowing in through the windows and I can hear tractor hum far away. Time is taking forever. Then mom is back, thrusting forward a bright bundle of flowers. In one moment: happiness. Proust had madeleines; I have zinnias.

And something of that juxtaposition, that crossing of  fancy, dancy car with simple flowers has stuck with me as a sort of emblem. For I retain a taste for curvy elegence balanced by homespun beauty. It is a taste that informs my garden as much as my memory.

Here is an example of that taste, a small classical pillar topped by ... a bowling ball, surronded by sambucus, phlox, monarda, valerian and firetail. The pillar itself is part of the structure of the garden, one overgrown and partialy hidden by romantic planting. It is topped by the abstract, geometric figure of a sphere, ... sphere as trash-picked bowling ball...

And here is my favorite zinnia for this summer. It combines a touch of green in its dusky rose petals. It is the most elegent zinnia I have seen yet. It makes me smile.

So, what makes you smile?  What sights take you back to a seminal memory that is a sort of emblem of your particular taste, your sense of style in this world?  Because if you really want to make a garden, you need to connect with that deep sensibility at the heart of you. That is your seed from which all the rest can flower.

Now--forgive me, dear reader, as my love of puns makes me abit ADD silly.  A while ago Bill Moyers gave a "gird up your loins" eulogy for populist historian Howard Zinn. So,-- for any of my liberal friends who may need heartening, here is another kind of Zinnia of Inspiration


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How-to

Zinnias are easy to grow. They like sun and can be started either inside or out once the air has warmed up. Lightly cover the seeds with a bit more than a fingernail's depth of dirt, and keep moist. Here is a good link with all the official info. Zinnia 'Queen Red Lime' is the strain, started from seed, pictured above as my present favorite. Any of the Benary's Giant mixes are also good. When growing them downy mildew can be a problem in our hot, humid summers. Since they are annuals, at a certain point you can just strip the offending leaves off.