Dottie over at D and G Gardens and Crafts blog asked me what I was doing differently this year in my garden. I’d have to say there are no dramatic changes, just a shift in emphasis. I’m trying to work harder at maintaining what I have, rather than adding a lot of new plants. I want to keep the beds that are in good shape weeded and edged.

I have two goals I am working towards besides the maintenance. I want to renovate the Juneberry bed, finally win my war against the grasses that have infiltrated it. My second goal is to create an outdoor eating area.

How about you? What are you doing differently this year?

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!

Goldenrod is my enemy

There, I’ve said it. I don’t care if goldenrod is a native plant; it is no longer welcome in my gardens. I tried to be understanding, truly, I did, but it just did not want to play nice with the other plants. It did not want to play at all: total garden bed domination was its only goal. And it just about succeeded:

Give it an inch, it will take the whole bed. About the only plant left standing is phlox--itself a native. August 2006

Several kinds of goldenrod

I should make clear before we go any further that there are many species of goldenrod. I’ve found three growing in my beds, and all three have a reputation for being “aggressively weedy.”

This goldenrod is most prevalent in our area. September 2008

Arrows point to rough-stemmed goldenrod. It has the widest leaves of the common ones. September 2008 (click on image to enlarge)

The very thin leaves give rise to the name grass-leaved goldenrod September 2008

Not all goldenrods are bad

Just because I am ousting some villains, I don’t want you to think all goldenrods are bad. Consider:

• Their pollen is sticky. It does not go airborne. It does not cause hay fever or other sneezing allergies. (You would think after all these years, this myth would have been dispelled. But just in case . . .)
• They have an “important role in native ecosystems as soil stabilizers and sources of food and shelter for wildlife.” (William Cullina)
• Other species are well-behaved. Even Solidago rugosa has a cultivar, ‘Fireworks’ that Allan Armitage calls “an outstanding selection.” Of course, the good goldenrods will probably not just show up in your border. Only the thugs do that.

Pull goldenrod early, and pull it often

True confession: when I said in the beginning that “I tried to be understanding” and tolerate goldenrod in my borders, that was a polite way of saying that I tried to rationalize my failure to weed this bed in a timely manner. I never deliberately planted goldenrod in any of my garden beds. I may have let the first seedling or two grow because I didn’t recognize it as a weed. And once it was blooming, I probably decided it was so pretty, I would pull it later. Before you know it, it had turned into a project that had to wait until I had time.

More than once, I tried to dig it out from amongst the perennials growing here, only to have it come back in the spring from roots I had missed. Then there was the year I started digging out the good plants–the plants I wanted to save–and planting them elsewhere. I finally realized nothing less than a complete renovation of the bed would be sufficient to eradicate the goldenrod.

I finally take back the garden

If you have ever attempted to drive a spade into a thriving bed of goldenrod, you would understand the daunting task I faced. It was so daunting, I didn’t face it for a year or two. (Don’t worry, it was easy enough to find other garden work to do.) In 2005 (yes, this has been an ongoing problem) my husband helped me renovate a three-foot wide section that adjoined the Birthday Garden. I managed to keep that goldenrod-free, which gave me the courage to tackle the rest of the front bed this year.

Follow my progress as I take back my garden bed from the domination of the Solidago species. Each thumbnail can be clicked to view a medium image with text, and can then be clicked again for an even larger view. Use the back button or click on the title to get back to the gallery.

How to succeed with a big weeding project

In the past, trying to accomplish large projects in small increments didn’t work. By the time I was ready for stage 2 of a project, stage 1 had become undone. For example, when I had worked on this bed years ago, the goldenrod had grown back before I could finish weeding the bed thoroughly. So I was really hesitant to tackle this project in stages, but I didn’t have a choice. There just isn’t a way to clear three consecutive days in my calendar, and I don’t think my body could handle that much consecutive wear and tear. I realized I didn’t have anything to lose, because if I “failed” the result wouldn’t be any worse than a goldenrod-infested bed, which I already had. What contributed to my success this time, when I had failed in the past?

• I stopped thinking of it as a do-or-die project. I realized if I could clear another three feet, and keep it clear, that would still be progress.
• On the other hand, I stopped approaching it as an attempt to “save” the bed that had been there, and recognized that I needed to renovate it, that is, start over.
• The weather cooperated. Lots of sunny, dry weather, which discouraged new weeds from sprouting and made the goldenrod easy to remove.
• I worked on it first thing in the morning, when the weather was cool and my energy level was high. This minimized procrastination.
• My kids were older. Babies and toddlers inevitably create the kind of interruptions that can sideline a project.
• Mercifully, no back spasms or other injuries that would sideline me.

Not all of the above are conditions which you control, which is why it is important not to get discouraged if your project isn’t successfully completed the first time you attempt it.

Identify your goldenrods online

I found Walter Muma’s Ontario Wildflowers site to be very helpful for identifying native plants. Not only are several photographs included, but the specific details that distinguish one species from another are listed with as little jargon as possible. I only wish I had discovered his site before my goldenrods had gone over; I might have been able to make a more positive identification of some of them.

Read about garden worthy native plants

The following books will help you learn about native plants. I reviewed them earlier this year.

Native Plants of the Northeast: A Guide for Gardening and Conservation by Donald Leopold (Timber Press, 2005).

Growing and Propagating Wildflowers of the United States and Canada by William Cullina (Houghton Mifflin, 2000).

Armitage’s Native Plants for North American Gardens by Allan Armitage (Timber Press, 2006).

How about you?

Did you ever have a garden bed where one plant took over? How did you tackle that problem? Are there any plants that are currently frustrating you with their aggressive growth? Let us know; perhaps someone else knows how to control it. Or, do you have a favorite, well-behaved native plant that more people should know and grow? Tell us about it in the comments.

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?

A small change in routine can make a big change in the garden

I was the oldest of a large family, and I aspired to be a good girl. Not so much in the sense of morally superior; I wanted to do it right, correctly. Even as a child, I was a perfectionist.

Perfectionists: You know the type

If there is something to be assembled, I am reading the instructions. If we are going somewhere, the map is in my hands, opened, and I know which exit we just passed, and how many more until we arrive. And when it comes to the care and feeding of a middle-aged woman, I have read the manual, and I’ve been trying to follow the directions.

To make sure the exercising got done, I always did it first thing in the morning. But a funny thing happened on the way to better health. My garden got more and more neglected. “No, duh, Kathy,” I hear you saying, “you just didn’t have enough time.” Well, none of us has enough time, do we? But that wasn’t quite it. I was dutifully giving my best time, my most effective hours, to a boring exercise regimen, and when there was time to garden later in the day, it was too hot, or I was too tired, or I was just plain engrossed in something else (usually writing or computer related) and forgot to make time.

No more dreary duty

This summer, I just said no to the good-girl, follow-the-rules exercise routine, and gave my best morning hours to gardening. Each morning I venture forth shortly after my husband leaves for work, and usually keep at it until the heat, humidity, or bugs drive me in, sometime in the late morning. I started out in late May and early June pulling garlic mustard. Then it was on to my own flower beds, bringing the best-kept ones up to snuff and then tackling the more neglected ones.

I can’t tell you how enormously satisfying this has been, but if you’re a gardener, I suspect you know. Weeds don’t just steal nutrients and water from the cultivated plants. They spoil the design, obscuring the carefully (or not so carefully) planned color schemes, the contrasts in texture. It’s like someone colored outside the lines in your coloring book, and by weeding you remove those errants marks.

Reclaiming a neglected daylily bed

It’s not finished, but it’s coming along

I’ve been especially happy working on the Juneberry bed that has discouraged me–no, shamed me for so long. Talk about not doing it right! I never got it finished last year, in part because I was trying to reclaim it the “right” way, working on one section at a time, getting all the weed roots out, replenishing the soil, cutting a new edge, and deadheading. This time around I just tackle whatever bugs me most at the moment, and the goal is not to do it right, but to make it look as good as possible as quickly as possible. How superficial. How inefficient. How self-indulgent! Yes, I’m not following the rules, and gardening is a lot more fun!

This is a view from the opposite side.

The rule-following good girl is just sure something bad will come of all this rule-breaking. The grass roots I didn’t pull out will resprout and make further inroads. There will almost certainly be a muscle spasm before the year is out, as the lack of stretching takes its toll. I’m not losing any more weight, but I haven’t been gaining, either, and I just hope the lack of aerobic exercise doesn’t make me more vulnerable to the medical problems I’m at risk for. Living dangerously, Kathy Purdy style.

That’s my summer in a garden. A little shift in routine, a lot more weeds pulled–even if I didn’t get all the roots. Oh, well, nobody’s perfect.

This is my contribution to the June-July Garden Bloggers’ Book Club meeting. For some reason the library sat on my request for My Summer in a Garden and are just getting around to processing it. So instead of reviewing the book, I’m describing my own summer instead.

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:

The Bad

I had a hard time deciding which photos illustrate bad, and which illustrate ugly. I finally decided that while everything that was bad in my garden was ugly, not everything that was ugly was bad. Last year I planted four winterberries in this wet area by the road:

I planted four winterberries here last spring

Did anyone ever tell you that not many plants grow in a wet, soggy area, but the ones that grow there grow really, really well?

This is the winterberry closest to the lawn after I hacked back the weeds growing around it

I had wanted to plant winterberries here for years, but I was so afraid this would happen. Well, it’s happened, and somehow I am surviving. So are the winterberries, at least this year. But my conscience scolds me as if I were a misbehaving dog: “Bad, Kathy! Bad!”

I had the presence of mind to tag each one with flagging tape this spring, before the undergrowth became overgrowth. Flagging tape and tomato cages have saved many a garden plant growing in the wilder areas of our property from the string trimmer and the brush mower, but my inhouse landscape crew won’t even touch this area now that I’ve got shrubs planted here. They’re too afraid of killing something that Collin and I (uh, mostly Collin) went to such trouble to plant.

Eventually these shrubs should reach nine feet, if they manage to outlive the competition.

The Ugly

There’s a lot of ugly around here to choose from, so I tried to find an example of it that at least had hope of redemption. Here’s what the purple-and-gold bed looks like these days:

The purple-and-gold bed has seen better days

This bed needs a complete makeover, which it probably won’t get this year. That pink hollyhock mallow just showed up, like it does everywhere, and I just haven’t gotten around to pulling it. (I tell myself I’ll do it after a nice, soaking rain, but at the rate we’re getting rain (not) it just might go to seed if I wait that long.) Milkweed has an almost tropical presence, and the flowers are fragrant, but they don’t match the color scheme either. The purple mallow that I did want in this bed is gone, and the ‘Bluestocking’ bee balm that matches it so perfectly is a shadow of its former self. (There’s still a bit of it to the right of the gold ‘Stella d’Oro’ daylily, but it’s only in bud, and thus invisible.)

Here’s what it looked like in its prime:

The purple-and-gold bed 11 years ago

How the pretty have fallen. Sigh.

The Good

Yes, let’s end on a more cheerful note. I have managed to bring two of my flower beds back from the brink of destruction, and these days my heart wells with pleasure and gratitude when I see them. The Birthday Garden is a sliver of blossoms separating the south side of the house from the driveway. Way in the back are yellow and deep red daylilies, the plant on stilts is cephalaria, with lavender catmint billowing at its feet. I don’t even care that the scarlet poppies don’t really “go”; it all makes me happy.

The shady north side emphasizes foliage color and texture

In the spring, many woodland ephemerals are blooming here. As they go dormant, these foliage plants (pictured above) are really hitting their stride. I really like how the variegated bulbous oat grass at bottom right highlights the white edge of the hosta ‘Francee’ just visible behind and to the left of the ornamental grass.

One vignette in the shady north border

That same clump of grass provides a wonderful contrast in color and texture with the purple leaved heuchera next to it. Its dusky maroon leaves echo the color of the flopped over foxglove, and complement the pale yellow foxglove in the foreground. No lie: a well-designed flower border has as much going on as a classical symphony.

That broody hen knew what she was doing when she chose this area for her nesting site. I always look forward to turning the corner and taking in this view, remembering that it didn’t always look this good. As a matter of fact, at one point I wondered if anything would ever look good again. Thanks, Colleen, for a chance to get some perspective.

How about you? Dare you show the bad and ugly in your garden to the world, as well as the good? Let Colleen know in the comments to this post.

Canada thistle weaves throughout the peony bed

Observant readers may have noticed the prickly-leaved weed sidling up to ‘Rozella’ in my last post. That dastardly villain is Canada thistle, aka Cirsium arvense, and it is one nasty customer. According to the University of California Cooperative Extension,

Once established, Canada thistle spreads rapidly by horizontal roots, up to several meters per year. The extensive horizontal root system assures long-term persistence and spread by vegetative means. A segment of root as small as 1/8 to 3/8 inch (3-6 mm) in length and 1/16 inch (1 mm) in diameter is able to propagate a new plant. . . . Once established, Canada thistle is a fierce competitor for nutrients and water needed by crops or native plants. It produces allelopathic chemicals that assist in displacing competing plant species

Okay. It’s obvious this mess didn’t happen overnight. This peony bed was created in 2002, and my weeding practices have been, at best, inconsistent over the years. I’m really not sure what year the Canada thistle showed up, but since I wasn’t aware of how extensive its roots could get, I didn’t give this weed the immediate attention it apparently so richly deserved. I’m sure many times I looked at those spines and thought to myself, I’ll pull that the next time I have gloves handy. And even if I had gone to get gloves, the odds that I would have been distracted from my task by some other domestic duty or child-induced problem would have been pretty high. I’m not saying I never pulled the Canada thistles, I’m just saying I never pulled them frequently enough.

This year, I am trying to reform. I am making weeding my top priority in the garden. The peony bed was the very first thing I weeded in early spring, and I removed every single thistle plant as far down into the soil as I could manage. That might have been a mistake. According to the Colorado State Cooperative Extension,

Canada thistle allocates most of its reproductive energy into vegetative propagation. New shoots and roots can form almost anywhere along the root system of established plants. Tillage segments roots and stimulates new plants to develop. Shoots emerge from root and shoot pieces about 15 days after disturbance by tillage. Small root pieces, 0.25 inch long by 0.125 inch in diameter, have enough stored energy to develop new plants. Also, these small roots can survive at least 100 days without nutrient replenishment from photosynthesis.

As Purdue University explains further,

Removal of shoots and severe damage to established plants stimulate new growth from underground buds. It is the buds on the creeping roots of established Canada thistle plants which largely account for re-establishment after attempts at control. Buds on creeping roots can generate new shoots a year or more after top-growth has been destroyed.

So I think by pulling and digging, I actually encouraged the thistles to make more shoots and more roots. It’s one devil of a weed, I’m telling you. Those roots have to be deprived of nutrition over and over again to eradicate it.

In established plants of Canada thistle, carbohydrates move from the root system up to the newly forming shoots as growth starts in spring. As leaves on the shoots develop, photosynthates start moving to newly developing roots and flowerheads. The developing flowerheads take more and more of the energy (photosynthates) produced by the leafy stems and stored in the roots. Carbohydrates in the root system are at their lowest when the plant begins flowering.

Ideally, you’d remove each stem when it was in flower, so that the roots had the least amount of reserves. The largest shoots in this infestation were budding up, and so I decided to remove all the shoots today. I wore leather gloves, but I didn’t pull the shoots out. I cut them off at soil level, and threw them straight into the wheelbarrow:

It took me an hour or two to snip all the thistles in the peony bed

After the research I’ve recently done on Canada thistle, I know this is just the first round in a long fight. The peony bed looks a lot better at the moment, but I have no illusions about the future.

It’s prickly.

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.

From this space, roughly five feet wide by six feet deep . . . . . . I dug out all these dock roots (that’s a 15-inch ruler) . . . plus this wagon full of rocks . . .plus these additional weed roots, mostly goldenrod

This time of year, when the soil is saturated from snowmelt and spring rain, is the only time I have any hope of extracting dock roots in something close to their entirety. They put dandelion roots to shame in terms of length and sheer tenacity. I have seen dandelion roots as long, but they are usually growing in good soil and are easier to pull, assuming, of course, that you have loosened the soil with a garden fork first. That’s why dandelions get their difficult reputation, I’m convinced–because people are trying to pull them out of the lawn without disturbing the surrounding sod. I always loosen the soil around a tap-rooted weed with the fork first, and I grasp it below the crown. If it doesn’t come out with a slow but steady pull, I move more dirt away from it and have another go with the fork.

I didn’t really give this area a thorough digging. I just raked the leaves from one spot, dug up all the dock I could find, and then repeated the process until I had gone over the whole area. I’m sure I missed some, and I know there’s more goldenrod. Just after I finished, the UPS man pulled up, quite late for him, and handed me my Fedco shrub order, which has the hydrangea in it, as well as 5 winterberries.

Is there anyone in North America not having an atypical winter? These twigs were photographed by Justin in January. After I took the photos for the preceding post the first Saturday in February, I was able to spend a good two hours weeding before being chased inside by rain. For those of you who live in warmer climes and may not understand the significance of this, normally in February the ground is frozen solid. Attempting to pull weeds is usually akin to pulling plants out of stone, assuming the leaves themselves aren’t frozen to the earth, and your gloves provide enough dexterity to grasp the plant while still keeping warmth in your fingers. And rain? In February? Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha! Surely you jest.

But not only was the ground thawed to the depth of the roots, but it wasn’t even that cold. I weeded all that time without my fingers getting numb. While I couldn’t figure out whether I was catching up on last autumn’s chores or getting a head start on spring’s, I was delighted to take advantage of the situation, though it somehow felt like cheating.

Normally the thaw starts in the second half of March, and continues, in fits and starts, through April. Throughout New England this period is referred to as mud season, because the thaw starts from the top and works down, and surface soil, saturated from snowmelt and rain, cannot drain because the deeper soil is still frozen. But do the northern prairie states and provinces have mud season, or is some other phenomenon at work there? Can anyone from the Midwest answer this for me?

All good things must come to an end, and we now are “enjoying” more typical February weather, with the high temp today in the 20sF and lows in the low teens. The ground is once again unyielding under my feet, and weeding once again becomes a highly unlikely afternoon activity. Join me in a cup of tea?