Being a Complete Gardener

This is a summary of today’s post .

• What does it take to be a complete gardener?  Today we are turning this question over, while dealing with the decay and degeneration the late autumn garden, having recently read the book of that name by the great English gardener Monty Don.  He gives us much to think about, and his strong gardening ethics and brilliant color compositions can inspire us all.
• Also, please check out the photos posted in the area to the upper left, “Weekly Garden Photos”, for some new and beautiful pictures of what is going on in the autumn garden.  The garden is OPEN today, so please come in!
• And in the “What I’m Reading” section (lower right), we are reviewing The Collected Short Stories of W. Somerset Maugham.  He was one of the most accomplished and admired authors of the 20 ^th Century, whose pen produced such durable classics as Of Human Bondage and The Razor’s Edge .  But he is also popular for his incredible output of short stories, written over a long and busy lifetime, and we are reviewing them today.
• Are you an idealist?  Most gardeners are, by nature.  And today, to the left of this post, under the headline “Snapshot: Gardeners Are Idealists” we are talking about that and about how our country has changed in our lifetime from a nation of frank idealists to something else, something a bit more mean and cynical.  But we  gardeners do not lose hope and we do not give up our native idealism.  Check it out.

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I went for a long walk around our lovely town last Sunday with Cosimo at 7 a.m.  There was fog everywhere, the beautiful trees were spangled with fall color in the deep mysterious fog; it was very quiet and we hardly saw another soul in the muffled, mellow landscape, and I was reminded how special this small town is.  The huge, gracious historic homes set deep in their large yards with their enormous old trees, especially when wreathed in fog like this, look like scenes from the romantic painter Thomas Kincaid.  The charm of his work is that it evokes a vanished era you can’t easily find anymore today, but it has not entirely vanished here.

Today there is no fog but instead a fresh, mild tang to the air like the first nice spring morning.  We had five days of persistent rain last week from a tropical storm sitting on the Mid-Atlantic States, so the sunshine yesterday and today was most welcome.  Privately I am gloating over a new packet of seeds, sent by some friends as a thank you for showing them around the historic sites of Philadelphia.  It is a packet of four o’clock seeds gathered by them in Mendoza, Argentina at the foot of the Andes.  Four o’clocks are originally Peruvian, as is the husband of this couple, so they like to grow them for that reason.  I used to love these as a boy, and intend to plant them in the herbaceous border in the spring. As I drove off to work this morning, I noticed the very tall, very old pink rose that I moved twice in the fence bed, trying to get it into a place with a bit more sun, before finally and grudgingly moving it to the oval bed, where it should be all right at last.  And, in its aged zeal and hardiness, it is usually the last thing blooming in my garden; ordinarily it has at least one ragged bloom hanging on well into December, and actually I like how this grande dame of my garden insists every year on having the last word.  I would be so disappointed if it were otherwise.

Elsewhere in the garden, death and degeneration are everywhere one looks and the beds are all looking brown and blowsy.  Fallen leaves are everywhere too, and I really need to rake them up.  The gardens need clearing and I didn’t plant any crocuses yet in this garden, disgracefully, as a garden is not really a garden if it is bereft of crocuses, I feel.  After I have raked the grass clear of leaves, I will mow and fertilize it, just in time before it is too late in the season.  Rows of daffodils, hundreds of them, were put in the side yard.  I finished repairing and painting the last of the basement windows white.

Inside, we have started the remodeling of the front room and the dining room, and I am beginning to think of other indoor, winter projects and even, pathetically, to read garden books already and to dream about spring – far too early for that kind of longing really; I should get busy on Christmas decorations instead.  Normally I don’t get the garden book bug until after the dark solstice, but today the Christmas decorations will have to wait as I have already been going over Monte Don’s superb book, The Complete Gardener .  I like his steady, common sense approach to gardening, and especially his holistic, no-chemical ethic that is so very admirable, as well as his willingness to accept the gardening facts of life that he can’t change without poison or other cruelty.  Those are all things I am also working on in my own gardening life. For example, moles and voles are terribly destructive pests, as anyone who has had them can attest, but he notes that without them he would not have the very fine soil they pile up and which he uses for potting seedlings.  And without moles and voles he would not have owls in his garden, either.  Which reminds me that, as I fell asleep last night, I could distinctly hear an owl hooting in the neighbors’ tall and ancient trees next door, so loud you could hear him plainly with the window closed.

And Monty Don has given me a few ideas for things I want to do next year, such as plant three or four new lavenders or Russian sages in the crescent bed and actually care for them, so they don’t look like scraggly old sagebrush from the Wild West.  Actually, thinking of that, sage is one of my favorite plants and growing up as a boy in the West it was everywhere in the hills and wild country where we kids used to play.  Here I mean sagebrush, not the salvia sort, which is also fine in its own way, but a very different creature altogether.  The intense perfume of the western sagebrush, actually like lavender and Russian sage in its way, is inseparable from my childhood memory.  When the time came for me to go away to school in England for three years, one of the last things I did before leaving home was to go out behind our house and break off a sprig of sage and put it in my sea trunk.  When I got to Oxford, I put it in a tiny vase on my fireplace mantel and there it remained for all three years.  Every time I got homesick (which was often, especially at first), I would gently bruise the dried leaves to release their comforting perfume from a sunny hillside far away at home, and it would soothe me greatly. But I digress.  The gardener’s mind in winter teems with ideas for the spring garden and another project I want to work on next year is to use the new area I cleaned out by the fence bed for two kinds of allium that I think would do well there: “ schubertii ” and “purple sensation”, paired with pale pink poppies, which are so much more beautiful to my mind than the loud orange ones I inherited here.  Still, poppies have always been difficult to grow – at least for me; others seem to have no difficulty and of course in Europe they grow everywhere like weeds, which is rather humiliating.  So I suppose I should not grouse about what I have got.  And I should try not to forget this year to cut our poppies down hard after they are done flowing next spring, to induce a second show in late summer, when their vigorous habit and loud colors would be so welcome.  Probably I will forget again, if past experience is any guide.

Also later in summer, foxgloves would do well in this same spot, if I could ever manage the diligence to get them started.  I do notice them popping up all over the place now, especially in the crescent bed where I scattered a bunch of seed and then forgot about it, and their mostly pale pink color provides a beautiful component to my overall color scheme.  How agreeable these flowers are; they take care of themselves, are not at all needy, have long-lasting flowers in pleasing colors, and best of all tolerate more shade than most flowers will put up with.  They are becoming very good friends indeed.

A lament: why, oh why can’t I manage to get some hollyhocks to grow in the long herbaceous border?  They were so easy for me to grow in Colorado and here it has been such a struggle.  A mystery.  The front garden would be such a good place for them, and they would look so well with all the other tall things there.  Our house is a sprawling, bungalow-style Arts & Crafts house built in 1888, making it one of the earliest Arts & Crafts houses built in America, and nothing says “bungalow” or “cottage garden” as plainly as a hollyhock, especially the single, old-fashioned kind, not even wisteria (which by the way I note that Monty Don now spells with an “e”, so I suppose everyone who has persisted spelling it wistaria is now really going to have to stop after all).  He also says he can grow rosemary in the English Midlands.  My experience of him is that he never exaggerates as most gardeners do, so I guess that is true although it surprised me to read that.  And I guess I can grow it here in New Jersey too, though I never thought of it before, I suppose because I remember ruling it out in our former garden in Colorado, because it was too cold and too high.

Overall, the color scheme that is emerging in my garden (not exactly by design and rather more by happy accident, though I wish I could take more credit for it, a feeling known by every gardener who receives happy garden accidents he did not plan and suspects, probably rightly, that he does not merit) is a blur of purple, pink and white, with a little bit of yellow and red thrown in here and there for its shock value.  Plum red and pale yellow would be the ideal accents, but I seem to be succeeding more with orange-red and chromatic yellow, and part of being a mature gardener is realizing you do not control everything or should even want to, and instead that you should accept and work with the serendipity you are visited with, and likely do not deserve, as is the case with me. Well, enough dreaming about spring and the gardens to come.  She Who Must Be Obeyed has now called out with what could fairly be described as mounting irritation, for some help with the Christmas tree lights and the picture perfect, Thomas Kincaid scene she is creating by putting up and decorating a tree on our large front porch.  An important part of being a complete gardener is to know when to stop being a gardener and resume being a mere mortal.