Cold Climate Gardening

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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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.

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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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I’m so psyched! Rundy finally started mowing a trail through the secret garden with the DR Brush Mower. It has been my dream for years to have walking trails through our acreage and it’s finally coming true. Ever since I walked the paths in my Grandma LaFemina’s Long Island yard, and followed my Uncle Jimmy along a path through the woods near his house, I have been drawn to paths or trails leading off into the quasi-unknown. When we first moved here, I struggled to understand what I wanted my garden to be–what garden meant to me, psychologically. It wasn’t until I read “North by North Hill” by Wayne Winterrowd in an issue of Horticulture that …

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