Cold Climate Gardening

News flash: There is a snowdrop that blooms in the fall, Galanthus reginae-olgae, Queen Olga’s snowdrop. Wayne Winterrowd and Joe Eck, in the most excellent A Year at North Hill: Four Seasons in a Vermont Garden, confirm that

It does indeed bloom in the snow, the first snow, which generally comes about the last week in October. . . . The effect is either unsettling or boundlessly optimistic, depending on your cast of mind. But because snow can be heavy here, even in late October, Queen Olga lives in a pot for us, blooming in the cool greenhouse from October to late November.

Jim Waddick and Jim Murrain, living in Kansas City, Missouri, have no such qualms about growing this snowdrop in the ground, as you can see from the following video:

Now while that does provide some good images of the plant under discussion, it’s not exactly a great video. I think it is more like a slide show. And while the music may be appropriate for the subject matter, sorry, it doesn’t do much for me. Before I went searching through YouTube for better gardening videos, I decided to check out VideoJug, which was recently included in a review of online how-to sites in the Wall Street Journal.

Popularity: 9% [?]

The latest edition of Yard & Garden Line News, put out by the University of Minnesota Extension Service, is so full of handy information I’m tempted to quote the whole thing.

First, there’s a thought-provoking article on whether or not to wrap young trees to prevent sun scald. As with so many recommended practices in horticulture, this has been dispensed as advice for years without anyone rigorously testing it for effectiveness. It sounds like the jury is still out, but there are plenty of ways you can do it incorrectly, and other things that may be more important to getting your new (and expensive) tree through the winter. And did you know the difference between frost cankers and frost cracks? Neither did I.

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I’ve never hidden the fact that my garden lacks adequate maintenance. It all started innocently enough with a strip of land between the house and the driveway, dubbed the birthday garden because everything in it was a gift for my birthday. I seemed to have no trouble keeping that up, so I started another bed, and since that was going okay, I started another one. Then I got to the point where I promised myself I would catch up on whatever I was falling behind on, but at the moment I needed to do something else. And for a long time I persuaded myself that I would be able to get things back in shape, in no time at all–next week, next month, next season. Finally, I realized I was in way over my head, and however many years it took me to get into this mess, that’s how many it would take to get me out. (This parallels my experience in other areas of my life, coincidentally.)

Sometimes I regard the mess that is my garden with cheerful acceptance, other times with resignation, and sometimes with dark self-loathing. It depends on how much sleep I’ve been getting, whether or not the sun is shining, and how many other aspects of my life are making me feel incompetent at the moment.

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Today is the first day of autumn if you garden in a cold climate in the Northern Hemisphere, that is. Just as spring comes much later than the supposed first day of spring (the vernal equinox), so the first day of autumn comes much earlier than the first day of autumn (the autumnal equinox). You have to go by what the weather and the plants tell you, not by what the calendar says.

It took me years to figure this out. All that good garden advice about planting perennials, shrubs, and …

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It’s funny. What Rundy saw as futility, I see as preventing futility. There’s an old garden maxim, “One year’s seeding yields seven years’ weeding.” Well, the worst “weed” in this particular bed was one of the original flowers I planted here myself: Malva alcea ‘Fastigiata’, also known as hollyhock mallow. Wonderful pink flowers, and lots of them–and every blossom produces copious amounts of seed, all of which germinates, sooner or later. You might at first glance mistake the foliage pictured at left as a clump of coral bells. But these are mallow seedlings carpeting every available inch of soil. I was removing them from a good six feet of flower bed. In some places I could use a tool to cut them off just below the soil surface, but when they were growing close to the garden plants, I had to pull them out one by one. Where the ground had been recently cultivated I could grab them out by the handful with a sideways motion, but in areas that hadn’t been dug up and replanted in years I had to grip each tenacious seedling by its taproot and pull. It was an exercise in futility only if you forget that most of those seedlings would grow up, flower, and create an even worse problem if I didn’t pull them now.

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We all have our preferences in futility. I have at various times made different forms of this observation, but today it struck me again as I watched my Mom weed her flower garden. I wouldn’t do that, I thought. It wasn’t because I thought weeding was too hard–weeding is easy. It wasn’t because I hate weeding–weeding is okay, and I actually enjoy the appearance of a weeded garden.

The futility of weeding is what gets to me. You spend a lot of time weeding a garden and a week later you need to do it all over again. And again. And again. It’s like running in place and never getting anywhere, or building castles in the sand only to have the …

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Early summer is the time when I pass from the state of “getting behind” into the state of “being behind.” It is a time when there are a lot of beautiful things I might take joy in, but instead find myself wallowing in guilt or despair over unaccomplished goals. Nobody knows how to ruin a good summer like one’s own self.

My great point of irritation is my unplanted corn. It should have been planted two weeks ago, but one event led to another and it still isn’t planted now. My laziness, or incompetent time management, is to blame somewhere. This case symbolizes all of my self-criticism where sources of grumbling and complaining are ever before me. It is easy to let this kind of attitude grow and consume oneself. Summer becomes one long litany of “I didn’t get this done, and I didn’t get that done,” all misery and complaining until it comes that one looks back on summer with deep dissatisfaction instead of happiness. Summer becomes one long whine of “I didn’t get that done” and all enjoyment is lost.

This calls for a right perspective, something I have difficulty with. I have a schedule, and I want life to follow my schedule, and my nose gets bent out of shape when it doesn’t. I didn’t get my corn planted when I want to. I think I’ll throw a snit.

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