Cold Climate Gardening

Forsythia before pruning beganBack in April, I discussed my upcoming plans to prune my forsythia bush. It wasn’t flowering very much, and my commenters agreed with me that it needed a heavy pruning. Some even suggested cutting the whole thing down to the ground. But I felt a little too nervous to do that.

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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 standard advice for pruning spring-blooming shrubs is to prune them no later than two weeks after they’re done blooming. This is because most spring-flowering shrubs, at least, all those commonly grown, develop their flower buds on the previous year’s wood. So if you prune them in high summer, or autumn, you are cutting off the wood that has the next spring’s flowers.
However, it is far easier to see the structure of the shrub you are pruning in late winter, when the temperatures have moderated somewhat but the shrub hasn’t leafed out or started blooming yet. And, in the case of forsythia, you can bring the prunings indoors, stick them in a container of water, and, in about a week, have forsythia blooming in the house. These in the photo were cut about a week ago, on one of those nice days just before winter returned.

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When we last left our gardener, she had just received her Fedco shrub order, shortly after removing one and a half pounds of dock root from the spot where she wanted to plant her Hydrangea ‘Endless Summer.’

Have you ever had a gardening project turn into a Project? Heh. If you’ve been gardening any length of time at all, I know you have. And if you haven’t gardened much, well, your turn is coming.

The first surprise was when I opened up the box. The hydrangea was already partially leafed out. But, I fretted, bareroot shrubs aren’t supposed to leaf out until after they’ve been planted. (Obviously my plants don’t read the plant books, just like my babies never seemed to read the baby care books.) The Fedco catalog said nothing about what to do in this circumstance, but there were really only two choices: pot it up and keep it protected until all danger of frost was past, or plant it in the ground and hope for the best. I decided I might as well plant it, since the chances of my remembering to bring it in every cold night for the next 50 or so days was not very good.

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This is a photo of my Forsythia ‘Meadowlark’ blooming–sparsely, I grant you, but nevertheless blooming–in September. If I hadn’t been checking for signs of the colchicums recently planted in this area, I’m sure I never would have noticed the yellow blossoms, so it is entirely possible this shrub has done this other years without my being aware of it. On the other hand, dinner table consensus was that it had bloomed pretty poorly this spring, so maybe these were flower buds that didn’t “get it” this past spring. Worse, these could be next year’s flowers jumping the gun, in which case there may well …

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One of my favorite places to buy gardening books is Edward Hamilton. They do sell some new books, but most of them are remainders and closeouts. No problem when it comes to gardening books, as they don’t go out of date that fast and the good ones always bear re-reading.

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I’ve been reading Lilacs for the Garden by Jennifer Bennett. It’s a much more approachable book than Fiala’s Lilacs: The Genus Syringa and has detailed information on numerous cultivars and species. I’ve discovered lilacs that bloom earlier and later than the ones in my garden, especially fragrant lilacs, especially hardy lilacs, and lilacs that do well in the South (not that I need them). Most enlightening was the chapter …

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