Cold Climate Gardening

In a previous post, I told you a little about the people I met at Spring Fling, the first national meet-up of garden bloggers, held in Austin, Texas on April 5th. Here are photos of some of the places we visited, along with my thoughts and observations. (Click on any photo for a larger version.)
Zanthan Gardens
This is what greets you when you go through the gate and enter the back garden at Zanthan Gardens.

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Inspiring Ideas and Photos Take the Autumn Garden to the Next Level
I’d read several books by Piet Oudolf and by Wolfgang Oehme, but I never really “got” the fall garden until I read Fallscaping, by Nancy Ondra and Stephanie Cohen. Somehow those two American women made gardening in the fall accessible to me in a way that those two foreign-born men did not.

This doesn’t really surprise me, as I was impressed with how down-to-earth and practical The Perennial Gardener’s Design Primer, their first collaboration, was. They leave no class of plant behind in their quest to help you maximize the beauty from your fall garden, and provide you with dozens of design strategies. And if their words don’t convince you, the photographs by Rob Cardillo will totally wow you. Take a look at this combination of pink muhly grass (Muhlenbergia capillaris) and Arkansas bluestar (Amsonia hubrichtii).

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I have long fantasized having a substantial arbor dripping with roses. Ignoring the fact that there aren’t too many repeat-blooming climbers hardy enough to take my climate, I realize with dismay that my most favored place to site an arbor turns out to be on a slope every time I leave my dream world and actually go take a look. Then there is the little matter of cost, and the issue of frost heaving, and with one thing and another I’ve never installed an arbor.

Over ten years ago, however, a winter storm bent a large branch of a large box elder tree in the Secret Garden. (Click on the photo at left to enlarge it.) You can see this box elder to the right in the background in my November entry for the Design Workshop. At the time, the path didn’t run this way. It made a direct beeline from the house to a location just in the foreground and then turned left down the path that you can see in this photo. I redirected the path as a result of this branch coming down, intending that it become a natural arch framing the path and drawing you in from the entrance.

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Perhaps it is a bit extreme to say “Paths make the garden,” but ever since I was a child paths have been an emotionally significant element to my enjoyment of a garden. I didn’t realize this until we moved to the rural 15 acres where we now live, when I struggled with how to turn acreage into a garden.

That a path exists gives a sense of safety. You know you won’t get lost or swallowed up as long as you can see the path. The fact that you can’t see where a path leads is what lends it the air of mystery, what gives you a little tingle of excitement.

Once I realized that paths were called for, the problem became one of creating and maintaining them. (I still feel abysmally ignorant about this subject, so if anyone knows of a book on trail maintenance, please let me know.)

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Long-time readers of my blog know that I have never shied away from being honest about the poor upkeep of my garden. Sometimes I find beauty in the weeds, and sometimes they depress me, but I’ve never pretended they didn’t exist. I agree with Colleen that fear of “not doing it right,” or “not being good enough,” can keep someone from starting to garden–it almost stopped me. So I am happy to make my contribution to The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly:

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And what is retirement for, if not to make a few dreams come true? And what is a garden for, if not to satisfy the longings of your heart?

I have learned a lot from watching the garden of my best garden buddy, Bub, develop. The most satisfying garden, for the gardener and for others, is one that grows out of the desires of your heart. Bub’s garden is filled with hellebores, daylilies, and even trees that she grew from seed, musical instruments she can play, birds, chipmunks, and squirrels she can watch and feed, and a labyrinth through which she walks.

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The Intimate Garden: Twenty Years and Four Seasons in Our Garden by Gordon and Mary Hayward belongs to the rare breed of landscape design book that is actually helpful:
One private residential garden–not little glimpses of a dozen gardens
The garden was developed over many years. (They figured it out as they went along)
They tell you the problem, solutions considered, and what they finally implemented
They tell you about their mistakes, and how they corrected them
There is a labeled map of the whole gardenI only know of one other book with the same scope that is so helpful, and that is Mary Keen’s Creating a Garden. But Mary Keen lives in Great Britain, and even while drooling over the gorgeous photos of her garden, I’m always wondering, “Is that hardy here?”

The Haywards, on the other hand, live in Vermont, in Zone 4, and I can be fairly certain that if a plant grows for them, it will grow for me.

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