Since I just got done telling you what the new USDA Hardiness Map is not good for, I thought I should at least show you how to have some fun with it. Okay, not rolling on the floor laughing fun. Probably more like, “what can I do instead of my taxes?” fun. But, hey, fun is defined by the alternative. The USDA says its new map “enables viewers to examine plant hardiness zones at a much finer scale than ever before.” We’re going to see just how fine we can get it.

Find Your Coordinates

In your own mind, choose a place whose hardiness you want to know. No, you don’t have to tell anybody, but let’s just assume it is your own garden. First, you need to know the latitude and longitude of that place. If you don’t happen to have it memorized, go to Google Maps and type in the street address. Right-click on the location marker and choose Drop LatLng Marker from the little menu that pops up. Write down the coordinates (low tech), or do the next step in a new browser window (low stress), or go ahead, memorize the coordinates (nerd!). Suit yourself. If you have some easier, better way to get the coordinates, you can tell me in the comments.

Enter Your Zip Code

Next, visit the new hardiness map site. Make sure you’re on the interactive map tab. Unfortunately, there’s no way to directly enter the map coordinates we obtained in step one. We have to achieve our goal through a rather kludgy process. Enter the zip code for your chosen location in the box provided, right under the words Interactive Map in the upper left corner. (If you don’t know your zip code, look it up here.) Click the Locate button, if you haven’t already figured that out.

Zoom In With the Best Base Map

Now you are in the general area. But you can get much closer. You can move the map around by clicking on it and holding down the mouse button as you move it around. Slide the zoom level all the way to the top so you are zoomed in as close as possible.

Choose the basemap and the transparency level

Click Marks the Spot

The moment of truth has arrived. Click on the spot that you believe is your chosen location. A little box will pop up, informing you of the zone, the average temperature of that spot, the temperature range, and the latitude and longitude of the place that you clicked on. This is how you determine how accurately you clicked on the exact, precise location you desired. In my case, I was .01078 off in latitude and .00470 off in longitude, so I feel like I got it close enough. At my new house, I am Zone 5b, the average winter low is -13F (-25C), and the range is -15F to -10F (-26.1C to -23.3C). At my old house, I could see the road on the interactive zone map when I was all the way zoomed in, and I was only off by .00096 in latitude and .00068 in longitude. Pretty much right on the mark. Here at the old place, it is also Zone 5b, the average temp. is -13.9F, and the range is exactly the same. Keep in mind these are interpolated results. I have found that if you click around in the same general location, you get a different average temp every time. Whether it really means anything is another story. But, hey, it beats doing taxes, right?

Mulch can kill trees–that sounds kind of extreme, doesn’t it? But it caught your attention, right? I suppose it would be more accurate to say improper mulching can kill trees, but as I look around me, improper mulching of trees seems to be the standard practice, the only kind of mulching around trees that’s being done.

The previous owners of our new home appear to have paid a lot of attention to detail and tried to rebuild and remodel everything correctly, so the house would endure. They very considerately left behind a paper detailing the house’s history, in which they say that this oak tree was planted in 1885, the same year the house was built:

The flare of this 126-year-old oak tree is buried in mulch

The tree flare is easily visible on this tree growing in the woods without human intervention

How does mulch harm trees?

When you put mulch around the trunk of a tree and cover the root flare, you are covering up parts of the tree that were meant to be exposed to air. The excess moisture can cause rot, but the trunk of the tree is supposed to have access to air, and by piling up mulch against the bark you are preventing this. If the mulch is left there long enough, the tree will try to compensate by growing adventitious roots. Unfortunately, these same roots can wind up wrapping around the tree and girdling it. Figure 11 on this article written by a tree preservation expert illustrates this girdling in progress. The tree winds up killing itself. So we have three ways improper mulching can kill a tree:

1. rot
2. suffocation
3. girdling

In addition, the stress of improper mulching could make the tree more vulnerable to a secondary problem, such as an insect infestation.

Uh-oh. How do I fix this?

You need to remove the excess mulch from around the tree. I’ve started doing that with the oak that I mentioned previously.

I've started to remove the mulch from around the oak tree

So what’s the right way to mulch a tree?

According to Marianne Ophardt, a Washington State Cooperative Extension Agent writing for the Mid-Columbia Community Forestry Council, you should keep the mulch “six inches away from the trunks of young trees and one foot away from the trunks of older, mature trees.” Ideally, the mulch will be in a 2 to 4 inch layer extending out to the drip line, because lawn grass releases chemicals that inhibit the growth of trees. Not many homeowners with large trees want such vast expanses of mulch. Trees can grow in lawns, but more slowly. The most important thing is to avoid burying the tree flare.

Why does this happen?

I can understand why homeowners over-mulch their trees. They’ve heard that mulch is good for plants in general. They know that string trimmers can damage the trunk. But they want to have their lawn looking neat without getting off their riding lawn mowers if at all possible. It seems like the way to accomplish that is to mulch right up to the trunk, and mow right up to where the mulch and grass meet. I guess people spend so little time nowadays around naturally growing trees that the lack of a tree flare doesn’t bother them, or they think it doesn’t matter.

But I have seen plantings of trees around businesses, obviously hired out, that have “mulch volcanoes” around them. You would think a professional landscaper would know better. Could it be that their clients actually prefer the volcano look, and insist on it? What do you think?

Resources Consulted

• Root Collar Inspections
• Rejuvenating Tree Roots
• Mulching Trees is Good and Bad
• Saving the Maltby Oak

Mud season is over and your soil is finally drying out, and you’re contemplating adding soil amendments to your vegetable bed or mulch to your ornamental beds. The question is: how much do you need? Probably more than you think. To get an even remotely accurate answer, you will need a tape measure. I like to use one similar to the one pictured on the left for this kind of task. Measure the length and the width of your bed. Write that down. Then you need to come up with a rough idea of how much amendment will achieve your goals. For example, Tracy DiSabato-Aust, in her book The Well-Tended Perennial Garden: Planting and Pruning Techniques, recommends adding four inches of organic matter to a new landscaping bed. You may have seen a different recommendation somewhere else. But you need to have a depth measurement in mind before you can proceed.

Do The Math

Now, you can either do the math the old-fashioned way, with pencil and paper, or the semi-old-fashioned way, with hand-held calculator. Visit North Coast Gardening for instructions on calculating how much mulch or compost you need. Genevieve also links to this page which calculates area for you (you’ll need those length and width measurements you wrote down) and this page which calculates the amount of amendment you’ll need to buy, in bags or even truck loads. Ha-ha. I made you nervous, didn’t I? You thought you were going to have to do math, but you actually only have to put some measurements in boxes and click a virtual button. If only spreading and digging in your amendment were so easy!

If you already know the price of the amendment you’re considering, sit down before you make this final calculation of total cost. It can be shocking if you’ve never done this before. Multiply the price of one bag by the number of bags the previous calculator came up with.

If you find this whole discussion rather abstract, take a look at this Garden Math video by Greg Draiss. He demonstrates quite graphically how little one bag will cover. You’ll realize it makes sense to figure out how much you need before you hop in the car to go get it. If you just guess, you’ll probably need to make a second trip.

As I mentioned to Elizabeth, I’ve been busy planting roses. I received nine bareroot roses this spring from the generous folks at David Austin Roses. Three each of three varieties. I planted the three Crown Princess Margareta soon after they arrived. But I wanted to plant the other two varieties, Gertrude Jekyll and Sophy’s Rose, in front of our porch. Since the porch was scheduled to be dismantled and rebuilt this summer, I didn’t want to plant the roses until after the work was done.

Better Late Than Never

So it was that I found myself planting three Gertrude Jekyll roses on October 10th. (By the way, did you know that the British pronunciation of Jekyll is JEE-kull?) I think, under ideal circumstances, I would have planted them about a month earlier. But roses can take a light frost and keep on blooming, and their leaves persist through several hard frosts. Dan Segal, owner of The Plantsmen Nursery near Ithaca, assures me that “in fall, most plants continue to send out new roots even after the tops (stems, leaves, etc.) tire out.” I am confident that they have a better chance of making it through the winter in the ground than in their containers, and that clinches it for me. Any plant in a container needs to be two zones hardier to survive outdoors in the winter, because the roots aren’t insulated from the cold as they are when buried in the earth. And my experiments wintering over hardy perennials in my basement were not all that successful. So, in the ground they go.

Tie Up Your Roses

Click for larger

Tease out the roots with the tool of your choice.

Identify The Bud Union

The bud union is where the desired rose cultivar is grafted onto the rootstock

But if four inches is enough, well, why dig down those extra two inches? You may think I’m being lazy, but just think about how long those roots extend below the bud union. We are talking about an eighteen-inch deep, thirty-six-inch wide hole, dug in stony clay soil by an out-of-shape middle-aged woman who needs to function well enough to cook supper the following evening. Yes, I need the exercise, but I also need to finish before nightfall. (Not to mention the break I took for the Garden Rant Cocktail Hour.) And there are other awkwardnesses involved, such as where to put the dirt that you take out of the hole if you’ve already got the wheel barrow full of compost and you don’t want to pile it on the surrounding plants or the driveway. (This particular bed is sandwiched between the porch and the driveway.) And if you garden on a slope, a flat-bottomed hole will be deeper at the uphill end of the slope, so do you measure from the uphill side of the hole, or the downhill side? Yes, I actually worry about things like that.

The distance between the bud union and the end of the root mass can vary quite a bit

The rake handle helps me see where ground level truly is

David Austin Roses recommends digging an 18 inch deep planting hole for their roses

Backfill

Okay, now we’ve got our roses positioned in the hole at the correct depth. We need to fill the hole back up. The current wisdom (unless it changed while I wasn’t looking) is that you want to put the native soil, unamended, back into the hole. It is believed that plants are just as lazy as people are, and if the planting hole is filled with fluffy chocolate cake-mix soil but the surrounding soil is pasty clay, the roots won’t bother to penetrate the clay, but will instead circle around and around in the easy stuff, until there’s nothing left. I tried to keep this in mind when potting them up, adding some native soil to the commercial container mix. I also loosened the soil in the bottom and sides of the planting hole before I put the roses in, so it’s more amenable to root penetration. But I do amend the original soil with compost, or what passes for compost around here.

Why? Because. Because I take big rocks out of the hole, and something has to go back in. Because I just can’t believe that a little compost will hurt, and it might do some good. Because I’m the gardener and I can if I want to. I don’t thoroughly mix the soil I took out of the hole with compost. Rather, I throw in several shovelfuls of native soil, then a shovelful or two of compost. Once there’s enough backfill to hold the shrubs in place, I water it in, enabling the soil to settle in around the roots. Then I keep repeating the process. If I suspect there are air pockets, I poke my finger in around the roots to make sure the soil is in the nooks and crannies. Then I add more soil, more compost, water again.

Now this is important. I did not fill the planting hole all the way back up. According to Doug Green (or, more properly, the 1997 edition of his book, as he has re-published it more recently as an e-book), “burying leaves and emerging buds can quickly kill a [rose] plant.” Instead, he recommends only filling the hole back up to the level of the bud union. This is what I did. Then, he says, “let the rose grow until the end of the season, then finish filling in the trench in the fall when the plant is dormant.”

Bud union is four inches below ground level. The remaining soil will be shoveled in after the roses go dormant.

Why Plant in Groups of Three?

David Austin Roses suggests planting in groups of three or more with 18″ – 24″ between plants of the same variety, giving the effect of one large bush. Since they were kind enough to provide me with three of each variety, I decided to follow their advice. Dee Nash told me that she planted her sample roses this past spring in groups of three, and they did indeed look like one big shrub.

David Austin Roses Hardy to Zone 4

This was taken from a sheet I picked up in 2007.

• Gertrude Jekyll
• Charlotte
• The Mayflower
• Crown Princess Margareta
• Winchester Cathedral
• Mary Rose

There are a few more hardy roses listed on their website.

Editor’s note: Starting seeds is usually something cold climate gardeners do in the wi– no, I won’t say that word. But some seeds can be started now. Guest blogger Lisa Ueda shares her method for starting cannas from seed.

You, too, can grow cannas from seed!

My winter vacation destination of choice has always been the Florida Keys, where I usually fantasize about selling shells on the beach and leaving the snow behind. I find myself fascinated by the lush flower structures thriving in that great subtropical climate, so different from the Midwest. Wanting to recreate that in my own life, I’ve found that cannas are a great summer addition to my cottage gardens. With their dramatic banana leaf like foliage and impressive flower spikes, they help to draw the eye away from annuals and perennials that may be past their prime while I wait for their seed to ripen.

Seed-Grown Cannas Outperform Purchased Cannas

I was unhappy when the first cannas I brought home from my local mega store were stunted, didn’t bloom, and the rhizomes never kept. Not good. I was fortunate enough to be the lucky recipient of a large variety of canna seeds from a gardening friend who was thinning out her collection. This gave me the opportunity to boldly experiment with finding which seed starting technique would give me the highest germination rate and healthiest plants.  My seed grown cannas are easy to grow, flower abundantly, and the rhizomes, they’re massively healthy and keep VERY well during the winter.

Where to Find Canna Seed

Not everyone is lucky enough to score the kind of seed haul that I did. Park Seeds and Thompson and Morgan are two of my favorite companies, both offering canna seeds. As an active seed collector and trader, I’ve also enjoyed trading for canna seeds on the GardenWeb Seed Exchange. Being observant of forum etiquette and offering up more often than asking will increase your odds of finding the seed you’re looking for.

Start Canna Seed in January or August

Seeds started inside during January bloom the first year by July or August in my zone 4-5 garden, before being cut back by the first heavy frost, and dug and packed in peat moss for storage in my just above freezing basement. Canna rhizomes should not be kept too warm, allowed to freeze, or completely dry out. Starting in August will produce good sized seedlings but no rhizomes. Bring them inside to a Southern facing window before the first frost, and continue to water and lightly fertilize until ready to plant out after the last Spring frost.

Basic Method for Starting Cannas from Seed

Since my gardens are caught up, I thought it would be fun to try germinating seed again. The last time I wound up with a gorgeous dwarf canna with the palest yellow flowers and red speckles, ever so delicate.

	I start with a baggie of ‘Tropical Sunrise’ seed and a Pedi file (only used to help nick seeds, part of my essential toolkit). ‘Tropical Sunrise’ has light green leaves and a marbled peach colored flower, so I’m really looking forward to this one.
	Firmly grip your seed and file the seed until it exposes a little bit of white. If you carefully feel the canna seed in your fingers, you’ll notice a slight bump, that’s the embryo, file on the other side of the seed to avoid damaging it. My daughter has nimble fingers, she’s my official canna seed filer.
	Next, put a small saucepan to boil with about 1″ (2.5 cm) water. Just as your water starts boiling, turn off the heat and take your pot off the stove.
	Once the water stops boiling, but is still hot, take all of your prepared canna seeds and briefly drop them into the very hot water until you hear them crackling, just a few pings. It’s not the same as listening to the last few pops of popcorn in the microwave so don’t overdo it. Immediately add cold water until it’s lukewarm.
	Soak until the seed double in size and you begin to see a white root emerging as in this photo (just passed 6 o’clock), typically in three to five days. Plant in sterile, moist growing medium, just below the soil surface. Keep warm and continue giving ample sun and water. Using this technique gave me an 80% germination rate on two to three year old seed.

Ta da! Four week old cannas thriving on my front porch. I’m already noticing variation among the leaf form. Two with strappier shaped foliage look like they might be struggling, the remaining six with standard shaped leaves are thriving. I won’t cull the two oddballs, I’m interested in seeing what they look like if they survive.

These cannas were started from seed

About the author: Lisa Ueda offers home gardening tips at The Frugal Garden. Her aim is to inspire, awaken and motivate new gardeners into discovering their inner green thumbs.

I bought this little Anemone nemorosa at the post-meeting plant sale at the Adirondack Chapter of the North American Rock Garden Society in Ithaca, NY last Saturday. After doing a little research, and finding out it likes shade and woodsy soil, I planted it on the shady side of the house on Sunday evening. I didn’t realize the hot weather was expected to get even hotter (90+F!) the following day. I knew the little plant would wilt in the heat and wind, so I hunted up my cache of plastic, open-weaved berry baskets and covered the little anemone with a basket. The rock keeps the basket from blowing away and provides additional shade.

A simple, temporary device to help a transplant get acclimated.

Improvise a Cool, Cloudy Day

It’s best to transplant divisions or seedlings on cool, cloudy days. But sometimes that’s not possible, or the weather unexpectedly changes. In that case, you want to provide an approximation of cool, cloudy weather by providing filtered sunlight and a windbreak. Divisions of perennial plants are often too big for berry baskets. Some gardeners construct A-frames with some kind of covering especially for protecting transplants, saving them from year to year. I usually come up with a cool, cloudy day, but when I can’t, I improvise:

Not too long ago, a reader emailed me and asked,

I bought some hostas and dwarf bleeding hearts to plant. Shortly thereafter I hurt my knee and I can’t go out there and plant them. They are all planted in one gallon plastic pots. How can I safely winter them? If I put them in my garage they will still freeze.

You may have plants in containers that should have been planted, but weren't. How do you winter them over?

It is the roots you are worried about freezing. The rule of thumb is that roots in a pot will effectively be in a situation two zones colder than plants in the ground. So if the plant tag says zone 5 and you are in zone 7 they should be fine.

But I’m guessing you live in a colder place. Definitely keep them outside until the tops die down. You want them to go dormant. After that, you want to put them in a situation where they will stay dormant but not get colder than two zones warmer than the hardiness zone on the tag. That will be different depending on what is available at your place. The garage might be okay, if it gets cold, but not as cold as outside. You could put them up against the house, and surround them with bags of leaves for insulation.

The other thing to consider is the greater the volume of soil in the container, the more insulation the roots will have. A one gallon container is not that big, and won’t have much insulating soil mix for the roots, so you might err on the side of caution and make that three zones warmer than the tag.

I have a drafty, dirt floor cellar that barely stays above freezing. I have put dormant plants in the coldest corner of the cellar and pulled them through the winter. They did start growing sooner than they should have, and made some pale spindly growth, but I very carefully hardened them off and planted them after all danger of frost. It was a pain in the neck but better than losing them.

Most herbs taste much better fresh, and rosemary is no exception. That’s why every winter I try to keep my rosemary alive in a pot inside the house. Rosemary is not reliably hardy north of zone 7, so while southerners can grow this in the ground and watch it take on shrub-like proportions, we cold climate gardeners must bring it into our houses and attempt to give it the equivalent of a southern winter indoors, or it will never really get big enough to harvest from regularly.

It’s not easy, let me tell you. More than one northern gardener has finished the winter with a dead rosemary plant. To succeed with any plant, a gardener thinks about its native range and tries to approximate those conditions. Rosemary is native to the Mediterranean basin. This is where many people make their first mistake. They hear that rosemary is drought-tolerant, and they let it dry out. But as Nancy Szerlag, Detroit News gardening columnist states, “a dry rosemary is a dead rosemary.” What people forget is that the Mediterranean climate receives almost all its yearly precipitation during the winter. The rosemary wintering over on a windowsill still expects it to rain.

That same Mediterranean native thinks winter is significantly cooler than the typical furnace-heated northern residence. Judy Miller, owner of Paradise Gardens Rare Plant Nursery and occasional contributor to this website, says, “I either keep it on a barely heated sunporch so it doesn’t go below freezing or above 50, or against the coldest window in a cold room.” No habitable room in my house stays below 50F in the winter, but some rooms are definitely cooler than others. Those are the rooms I consider for the rosemary.

This 8 year old 'Salem' rosemary is over 3 feet tall and wide. It spends each winter indoors. Photo by C.L. Fornari.

This frost damaged rosemary gives you an idea of how large my rosemary had gotten after two years. Unfortunately, all the leaves dropped and one whole section of the plant never came back after it was subjected to a late spring freeze.

Where to find named cultivars of rosemary

You can find rosemary in the spring almost anyplace that sells vegetable seedlings. However, if you want to get a specific cultivar, such as ‘Salem,’ you will probably have to order through the mail. Papa Geno’s Herb Farm has an extensive selection of rosemary varieties, including ‘Salem.’ I’ve never tried them myself, so if you have experience with them or have your own favorite source to recommend, please tell us all in the comments.

It all started when Jenn said my new bird bath needed some phlox. “Gosh, she’s right,” I mused. “And I have some bright pink phlox in the front bed that I want to move out before I dig out the goldenrod infestation. Those pink phlox would look perfect by the bird bath.”

In 2006, the birdbath seemed stuck in the middle of nowhere

Bird bath transforms septic lid

The bird bath rests on the lid to our septic tank. The septic lid was a level and stable place to put the bird bath. But it also disguises the septic lid, and incorporates it into the garden. When you look at it, you don’t think, “Oh, look, they put a bird bath on their septic lid.” Instead, your mind sees a bird bath resting on a concrete base. But without plants around it, the bird bath still looked like it was just plopped down.

Shape of bed determined by mowing path

The shape of the bed was determined by another design problem. We use a DR Brush Mower with a lawn attachment to cut the grass. The mower operator runs the machine along the chicken yard fence until he approaches the septic lid. Then he must turn away from the fence in order to go around the lid. This leaves a crescent shaped patch of grass that the operator must retrace his steps to mow. (You might be able to see that unmown grass shape in the photo above.) I used that crescent shape to determine the shape of the bed.

Plant choice informed by practical considerations

Plant choice was also affected by the septic lid. Our septic tank is pumped every year in early spring. That means foot traffic around the lid. Any plants growing in the immediate area either have to be slow to emerge or able to tolerate some foot traffic at that time. Furthermore, I had to accept that in the event of problems, the area might need to be dug up at any time. No sense planting anything precious or irreplaceable there, only to have grief later.

Too late to dig

It was already October when I realized it would be best to move the phlox that autumn if I wanted to dig goldenrod next spring. There was no time to dig a bed in the usual manner, removing sod, forking the soil to loosen clay and remove rocks, adding organic matter and forking it in. If I was going to make the bed before the ground froze solid, it would have to be without digging.

Proceeding without research

When I was in high school, someone had given me a copy of The Ruth Stout No-Work Garden Book, but sometime in the period after college but before gardening I got rid of it. Neither Lasagna Gardening nor Weedless Gardening were in my local library, and it would take too long for them to come from another library. I was forced to rely on my vague memories of Stout’s book and other reading I had done on the topic, plus an article in the April 1995 issue of Garden Gate (issue 2).

Now, I’m the kind of person who reads Consumer Reports before shopping for kitchen appliances. I don’t care if it’s a Cracker Jack prize, I read the instructions before attempting to put anything together. So, if I’d had my druthers, I would have read all three of the above mentioned books plus spent the summer calculating how many square feet of newspaper I needed and how many cubic yards of compost and mulch I needed to stockpile. But, I realized it was now or never. So I winged it, big time.

Follow along in this photo essay to see if starting this project without adequate research was a good idea.

Tell the truth, the whole truth

This fall I checked out Lasagna Gardening and Weedless Gardening and flipped through them. They both sound like miracle cures, and if you do everything right, maybe they are. But to summarize, here are some problems I had:

• Not enough cardboard/paper available
• Not enough organic material on hand
• No edging to keep grass out
• Truly pernicious weeds to battle

All of these problems could have been eliminated with better planning and a willingness to wait another year. But I find it disturbing that neither Lanza nor Reich address problematic plants such as bindweed or Japanese knotweed. Have they never had to deal with them?

Neither author addresses the price you must pay for the organic materials you can’t scavenge from your own property. They love to talk about free leaves or manure for the hauling, neglecting to mention that you need to have the use of a truck, or figure out a way to package manure so it won’t stink up your trunk. And no one was too concerned about the price of gas when either of those books were written. And where are you going to store all that stuff before you have time to build your bed?

This method does work. Colleen of In the Garden Online used it with great success. Margaret Roach has made her beds this way for years. And I have used a modified form of it for the beds I have reclaimed. I remove the garden plants I want to save and I dig out all the perennial weeds. Then I shovel at least three inches municipal compost on top–but I don’t dig it in. The compost is semi-decomposed wood chips, and functions as soil amendment and mulch. I just wish these books would tell the whole truth, and not just the part that’s pleasant to hear.

How to fix this mess?

I’m going to collect a bunch of newspapers, cut down the weeds in that one end, and start all over again. On the better maintained end, I’m going to cut the dianthus off at ground level and put more organic matter over the bed. I would love to cover the whole thing with mulch, but frigid weather may arrive before I get to that. As for the bindweed, I will continue to work on eradicating that, but I’m in it for the long haul.

How About You?

Have you tried a version of no-dig or weedless bed making? How did it work for you? I’d like to know. Or have you ever been frustrated by a gardening project that was supposed to be simple and easy–and turned out to be anything but? Tell us about it in the comments.

If you are short on time, energy, and money, but notably the first two, be conservative. You’ll be more pleased with one fair-sized, well-composed, well-maintained bed than with a half-dozen large beds that are choked with quack grass and creeping Charlie.

That’s excellent advice from The Complete Flower Gardener by Karan Davis Cutler and Barbara W. Ellis. Too bad their book wasn’t written in 1993, when I started work on my second flower bed. On second thought, it’s not at all certain that I would have recognized that advice as applying to me. I was keeping up on my first bed–The Birthday Garden–and there were neglected irises elsewhere in the yard that needed lifting and dividing, and then, of course, I’d have to make a bed to plant them in. Yes, there was always a good reason for creating yet another bed, and I was always confident that next year everything would be under control.

It was just two years ago that it finally started to dawn on me that I was in over my head. Something more drastic than triage weeding was called for. I had to think about eliminating entire beds.

Every spring since then has been a search and rescue operation. The photo above shows a portion of the bed in the front yard that has the single white lilac and the purple-leaved smokebush (Cotinus coggygria ‘Nordine’) in it, that I’ve decided will be a shrub-only border. In Autumn 2005 I removed some Oriental lilies from this bed. Much to my surprise, I discovered two more sprouting up this spring–but that’s not what the arrows are pointing to. Although Asiatic lilies can be moved almost anytime, Oriental lilies are best moved in fall, so I’ll mark them and move them then–if they haven’t succumbed to the competition.

You can probably recognize the clumps of narcissus foliage. Those are all Narcissus poeticus that were original to the property, which I had dug and replanted. Each one of those clumps was once a single replanted bulb. I hadn’t yet read the advice about not dotting things around when I planted them here. I will dig them up when the foliage withers, store them in net bags over the summer, and replant them in new locations in the fall. I’m already looking for potential planting spots for them in the landscape. They’re not going back in the garden beds, so I’m looking for spots that can stand to be left unmowed until mid-July, when the foliage will finally have died down. Since each clump easily represents over a dozen bulbs, I’ll probably have to give some away, too.

There’s a clump of colchicum foliage in there toward the front. That also represents one bulb, a white form of Colchicum byzantinum that turned out to be neither. I might put some of these in a garden bed, or give them the same treatment as the poet’s narcissus. They are also best dug when the foliage withers.

The arrows are pointing to two daylily clumps, which I need to dig soon and move . . . somewhere. They are two bits of the same original plant, a “plum” that often looks more like a washed out purply-gray. The poor color could have been due to too much shade. I’d like to give them a chance to prove themselves in better circumstances. Hmm . . . maybe to the side of the hydrangea I planted last year. The daylily blossoms just might complement the hydrangea blossoms, which are supposed to be blue or pink, but were rather indecisively neither, at least last year.

The remainder of the space is taken up with asters and golden rod, aggressive natives that will colonize any open ground that isn’t mowed like a lawn. They can be dug out as I have time and strength and motivation. The motivation will come when I decide what shrub to plant here. It should be fairly vigorous, able to compete with lilac and smokebush for water and nutrients, and able to take part shade, as the lilac will block it on the south and the smokebush will block it to the east. Ideally, some part of the new shrub will play off the foliage of the smokebush. I’d love to hear your ideas.