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From the Archives
Archive for June, 2008
Today in the Garden: Lilies, and Lots of Rain
I love lilies. Hemerocallis or Lilium, daylily or lily—it doesn’t matter. If there were a plant I could see myself collecting a bunch of, it would be lilies. Maybe when we have a bigger yard.
What I love is that I do absolutely nothing to my lilies or daylilies, and they provide my yard with these exuberant shows every single summer, and (purely by accident) I have some kind of lily blooming from late June through at least early September. I say purely by accident because it never occurred to me to actually plan any kind of bloom sequence. I fell in love with a good-looking photo in a catalog, or a particularly handsome specimen caught my eye at the nursery and whispered “take me home.” And being weak, and a sucker for a pretty face, I obliged.
Right now, I have the old “common” orange daylilies that everyone and their grandmother seems to grow (but which I love with a passion bordering on worship anyway) as well as some orange and yellow lilies (didn’t save the plant tags….) blooming in the front garden. The Madonna lilies are in full bud, and they’ll be blooming just as the oranges and yellows are finishing up. After that, the drop-dead gorgeous ‘Tom Pouce’ lily in the back garden will be coming into bloom, along with several very pretty pink and peach daylilies that I got in one of those bulk packages of daylilies at Frank’s before they closed down. (I loved Frank’s. There is still nothing quite like it around here.) Most of these are rebloomers, and keep me happy with sporadic blooming through the rest of the season. In the front garden, after the Madonnas finish up, I have a few reblooming red daylilies that provide color even when August’s heat and dryness make everything else look like hell.
Though, I wonder if that will happen this year. It’s been raining for the past four days here. Not all day, of course, but decent showers a couple of times per day. Last year, I was complaining about what a dry, hot spring we were having, and this year it’s raining so much that it’s hard to manage getting a good lawn mowing in. I will not complain. It definitely beats dragging the hose around. And the vegetable garden is loving it!
How’s your garden looking? And is there any one plant group that you find yourself buying, even though you tell yourself “I don’t really need another one…..”?
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Today in the Garden: Coreopsis ‘Early Sunrise’
So, it’s officially summer. I can’t think of a more appropriate plant to feature today than coreopsis ‘Early Sunrise.’ It just screams “sunshine,” doesn’t it?
I have three large clumps of this in my front garden, and I absolutely love them. Of course, I love anything that grows as well as this plant does. My front garden is in full sun, and I rarely water it. All I have to do for these coreopsis to keep them blooming straight through until frost is deadhead it regularly. Be sure to leave a few blooms on the plant at the end of the season, though. You can save seed and sow more over the winter! It would probably self-sow as well, but since I mulch this bed heavily, I haven’t had any volunteers show up yet.
Another thing I love about this plant is that it is one of the few perennials that grow easily from seed and bloom in their first year. I’ve started seed indoors under lights as well as by winter sowing, and both ways I’ve had very good germination. The first year, these plants don’t look like much, but you will get a bloom or two. Starting in the second year, ‘Early Sunrise’ blooms profusely, carrying vibrant orange-yellow blossoms above dark green foliage. This is another one of those plants I should have recommended for new gardeners. See, I knew I would think of a few more 
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Easy-Peasy Perennials
Elementary teachers have an ingenious system for teaching a new skill. They start out the lesson by having their students do a task that it is practically impossible to fail at. It builds confidence, shows them that they know more than they think they do, and gives kids the confidence to try something a little different. For example, when teaching a child how to write the letter A, a teacher will spend the entire lesson one day just having the kids draw a series of diagonal lines, which are the major component of the letter. The next day, the lesson may consist of having the child trace a series of letter A’s, and pointing out that the letter is made of the diagonal lines they worked on the previous day. The next day will have the kids tracing, and then doing five A’s without tracing them. Before you know it, the kid is an A-writing master.
New gardeners need the same gentle introduction into the world of plants, I think. I believe, based on observation of my family and neighbors, as well as plenty of emails over the last few years, that most people never get into gardening because it just seems like too much work, and too much of a gamble on top of it. We all learn to accept the death of a plant eventually; it’s part of being a gardener. But it is very disheartening when it’s the first plant you try. Some people conclude, at this point, that they just don’t have a “green thumb.”
But there are plenty of plants out there that anyone can grow. If you’re a Michigander, for example, I would recommend any of the following easy perennials:
–Daylilies
–Siberian iris
–Echinacea
–Rudbeckia
–Shasta daisies
–Switch grass (Panicum)
–Fountain grass (Pennisetum)
–Hardy geranium
I’m sure there are more, but these 8 are the ones that seem to just keep growing, no matter where they are planted or how badly they’re neglected. The only negative about them, if you can call it that, is that if they’re very, very happy where you’ve planted them, they’ll take over in no time. If they’re not especially happy, they’ll still grow and bloom, just not as exuberantly as they do in ideal circumstances.
Are these sexy plants? Not necessarily. Everyone has seen them. These are the kind of “ordinary plants” (as Amy calls them) that form the backbone of my garden. I can rely on them to look good no matter how busy I get. Once new gardeners get a taste of success and the confidence that comes with it, maybe they’ll feel up to tackling some of the sexier, more exciting plants. Or, at the very least, some that are a little pickier about their conditions than these ones are
What would you say? Which perennials would you absolutely recommend for a newbie gardener?
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More on Potty Mouths
There has been a bit of discussion in the ol’ garden blogosphere following my post about being a potty mouth garden blogger. Susan picked up on it over at Garden Rant and took full credit for the Rant’s 4% rating. Then Doug Green picked up on it, and posted about how something like labeling oneself a potty-mouthed garden blogger can affect your “personal brand.” If you haven’t read his post, go check it out, as well as the comments. I’ll wait.
Back? Okay, good.
Here’s my thing. I was discussing this with another garden blogger via email. And what I keep returning to is that garden blogs are personal. At first glance, they’re about the garden, but in all truthfulness they’re really about the gardener. When we read May Dreams Gardens, we’re spending time with Carol, not her garden. I don’t read garden blogs to be informed (although that happens plenty, as well!) I read garden blogs because of the overwhelming enthusiasm, no, passion, that garden bloggers have for what they do. Passion shows itself in many ways. Some garden bloggers are prolific writers–they don’t spend a day away from their blog because they’re so excited to tell us what’s going on, what they’ve learned, and even where they’ve failed. Some post less frequently, but their posts are so full of beauty and wonder that it’s clear that they are completely enamored with what they do. Some of us occasionally use strong language to make a point in our enthusiasm for what we do. Each way is fine, because in the end it’s about passion.
I can read vanilla, straightforward advice about gardening anywhere. I read plenty of it in newspaper columns and magazines. Hell, I write plenty of it for a living. This blog is my home, and when you visit my home, you get the real me, cuss words and all.
I know Doug was coming at the question from a professional garden writer’s point of view. And here’s what I have to say to that. If you Google my name, as almost anyone who is interested in working with anyone else professionally is bound to do nowadays, you will see plenty of online publishing credits that are written without any sign of profanity. You will see that, overwhelmingly, I am a professional. You’ll find links to my LinkedIn profile, my About.com site, my old Suite101 articles, several mentions of me in the Detroit Free Press and other papers across the U.S., and a few of my social media profiles. If you were to have my resume in your hand, you’d find these credits, plus dozens of gardening and green living articles that don’t bear my name because I’ve been contracted by other businesses to write them.
I’ve been called several things in my time as a blogger: effervescent, magnanimous, wonderful, blogosphere-changing (I still chuckle at that one, Susan!) but I’ve never once been called boring. I’ll take that as my personal brand, any day.
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Today in the Garden: Five Reasons My Garden Will Never Be Part of a Tour
I was reading Marty Hair’s article about garden tours last week in the Detroit Free Press, about all of the tours coming up in my area in the next month or so. Part of me is envious of those gardeners who are confident enough to put their gardens on display. I can’t imagine dozens of people meandering through my garden, analyzing my plant choices and general overall “togetherness” of my garden. The other part of me (the sane part) knows that some of us, as well as our gardens, just aren’t made for show. We do our thing, and all that matters is that it makes us happy.
Marty’s article showed some of these confident gardeners, as well as their gardens. It served to prove even more that mine is not a show garden. Here are five reasons why:
1. Big plastic toys. I have three kids and a mother-in-law who feels it is her God-given duty to buy them all kinds of big plastic toys. Right now, we have a plastic play house, a plastic picnic table, a purple plastic turtle sandbox and a plastic swimming pool. How does one tastefully integrate a plastic turtle into the landscape exactly?
2. Milk jugs, butter tubs, and two-liter bottles. My winter sowing containers aren’t exactly beautiful. And they sit on my potting bench for a long time. I’ve actually just now started planting some of the tiny perennials into a nursery bed. Several containers are still sitting there, waiting to be planted.
3. Clothes lines, constantly in use. We’ve been trying to reduce our impact, and one of the things we’ve done is to stop using the clothes dryer. Two clothes lines run from the maple tree to the garage, and they almost always have an array of towels, onesies, and t-shirts fluttering in the breeze. We hang the underwear from the clothes lines in the laundry room, but still….
4. My lawn is green. But it is far from manicured. I have plenty of clover, violets, creeping charlie, and even goddamn crabgrass invading my lawn. The only weeds I really bother pulling are the dandelions, and that’s only because if I let them go, I’d have nothing but. My neighbors’ yards are proof of that.
5. I am not a designer. It’s taken me a while to admit that I have absolutely no design sense. I can’t come up with breathtaking plant combinations like Kim, and I definitely don’t have enough foresight to actually plan a garden. I’m a collector (see plant at nursery, fall inlove, purchase, plunk in wherever it will fit and grow well) and, even more, I’m a geek. I love the process of growing. I love watching compost happen. I love buds and blooms, but I love the way plants look in their stages of decline as well. There is no coherency to my garden, no overarching theme that ties it all together. It is chaotic and messy, just like the rest of my life. And I’m not putting that on tour, either.
Come to think of it, I know I’m not the only one out there like this. Maybe we need a new kind of garden tour, one that does away with manicured lawns and perfect borders. We need a garden tour that shows all of the little imperfections that make life interesting—the random sunflower volunteer standing proudly among the roses, the violets blooming happily in the lawn, the messes made by just living in the garden. I bet we would get a lot more people labeling themselves as “gardeners” if they didn’t have this expectation that the only gardens that matter are the ones that are tour-worthy.
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