Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities!: Notes from a Gloucester Garden by Kim Smith made me aware of my garden book prejudices: What kind of title is that? You just don’t start a title with “oh” and end it with an exclamation point! And then I read the back cover: “Drawn by the tender magic of her brush, one feels somehow renewed under the spell of the author’s singular warmth as we stroll within these pages in the intimacy of the secret garden she reveals.” Uh-oh. This is going to be one of those hearts-and-flowers books, filled with overblown prose. How am I ever going to say something nice about it?

First Impression Misleading

But I was wrong. It’s true Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities is not your typical garden book. It’s not a reference book, it’s not an instruction manual, and it’s not a coffee-table eye candy number. It’s a collection of essays whose common thread is fresh ideas for your garden, so, ahem, I guess the title is actually pretty apt. And the flowery prose of the back cover blurb wasn’t written by the author, anyway.

Beauty in All Its Forms

Think of these essays as a series of conversations with a gardener who has not only learned by doing, but spent some time researching the topics dear to her heart. The essays are loosely arranged chronologically and often touch on fragrant plants, attracting butterflies, or Oriental garden philosophy–often all three in the same chapter. Every essay opens with poetry and often quotes more poetry further on, and every chapter, as well as the front cover, is liberally illustrated with the author’s watercolors. You get the impression that Kim Smith is sensitive to beauty in all its forms, and she wants to share them all with you.

You will surely learn something from this book. In a chapter on her outdoor shower, I learned that some sweet autumn clematis vines have no fragrance at all, which confirmed my own experience of this plant that others call wonderfully fragrant. In a chapter describing her first year in the garden, growing nothing but annuals as she observed what was already planted there, I learned she gets bloom from a second sowing of corn poppies. I suspect my growing season is a bit shorter, so that may not work for me, but it had never occurred to me to try. I love fragrant yellow daylilies, and now I know of a few I didn’t know before. Kim devotes a chapter to them, and is just as fond of good ol’ ‘Hyperion’ as I am. And I had no idea there was a lily-of-the-valley native to North America until I read about it on page 172: Convallaria majuscula.

Prejudiced No Longer

By the time I was done, Kim’s infectious enthusiasm had won me over, and the conversation in my head had changed entirely: Really? I’ll have to try it in my garden. . . . Hmm, I never knew that. The thing is, this book moves at a more leisurely pace, reminiscent of the older time in which her house was built. For Smith, it’s not about the destination, but about enjoying the trip, which really, for a gardener, never ends. It’s a great book to read in the winter, when you want a book to inspire daydreams as you peruse through mail order catalogs. It’s a great book to give to a gardener, precisely because, since it’s not a reference book, how-to manual, or eye candy number, they might not think it’s for them. But if they’re anything like me, they’ll get over their prejudices.

Oh Garden of Fresh Possibilities! is one of the prizes being offered in our scavenger hunt Have you entered yet?

It is easier to weed grass out of daylilies when the daylilies have gone dormant and the grass has not.

Seedlings!

I started out this mild day trying to be pragmatic. I had it in my head I should drain and store the garden hose, haul all the empty pots and window boxes down to the basement, and (sniff!) take down the hammock for the winter. But it all sounded so boring. Somehow I got my hands in the dirt, and I was a goner. What had I been thinking? I can do all that boring stuff when it’s chilly, wet, windy, and perhaps snowy. (Well, actually, the hammock should come down when it’s dry.) But the opportunity to pull some weeds in mild weather and moist soil, weeds that would be left to spring in a normal year, well, such an opportunity should not be missed. Especially since I find weeding so much more satisfying than draining hoses. (It is fascinating how far grass runners can travel in friable soil.)

I got the original hellebore from Seneca Hill Perennials. Owner Ellen Hornig has stopped offering hellebores in a big way, though she is sure to have something you’ve never grown–or even seen–before. According to her website, she will be accepting orders for spring after November 30. Gardeners, start your engines!

Every year about this time, the Juneberry bed looks like this:

This photo was taken last July, but gives you the general idea: milkweed, musk mallow, lambs’ quarters, and a weedy form of evening primrose all detract from the daylilies that are supposed to shine here.

Being a detail person, in past years I have attempted to deal with the problem by starting at one end, and taking care of every single weed in one spot before moving on. Like this:

A light bulb went on

But yesterday afternoon, I had a gardener’s epiphany. I don’t see this bed from the house, but it is highly visible from the road. What if I weeded it thinking of who was going to view it, and how they were going to view it? People whiz by in their cars. They can see the bright flowers. They can see the big weeds that obscure the structure of the daylilies. They can see the grass growing higher than the daylilies themselves, making the whole bed look sloppy. But they can’t see the ground ivy, the teeny seedlings, and the low growing dandelions.

Why don’t I weed this bed in terms of its audience, its main viewers? Why don’t I weed the whole thing so that it looks good from the road? This may be a no brainer to many of you, but to me it was a revelation. Sure, it would be better for the plants if I weeded it perfectly—and it would take me a week, and meanwhile all the other flower beds would only get worse. Yes, all those grass roots that didn’t come up when I tugged on the grass will resprout, but all those flowering weeds will never set seed now.

So this is how it looked an hour or two after the light bulb went on:

Much better, don’t you think? From a distance, this bed now looks like it is being cared for. I can see plenty of work left to do, but I know I’ve bought myself some time and can turn my attention elsewhere for a little while.

I never dreamed doing a less-than-perfect job would give me so much satisfaction. How about you? What new and obvious insights about gardening have you had lately?

These plants don’t look too happy, but I’m not sure if it’s the cold that put them in a snit, or a viral infection. Left to right: Daylily 2E, Colchicum giganteum, Daylily 4B, C. ‘Harlequin,’ Daylily 4C, C. speciousum

After nearly two weeks of warm, frost-free weather in April, my garden got socked with a 22 degree (-6C) night. I would like to think these poor plants are suffering from frost damage, but I know streaking in the leaves is a symptom of many plant viruses.

Please, faithful readers, if any of you have seen plants with this kind of leaf damage and know what it is, I’d love to benefit from your expertise. If you click on either of the above close-ups, you will get a much larger image that may make diagnosis easier.