FILLING HOLES
Right now in my garden the roses are in the midst of their August sulk, waiting for the Japanese beetles and the sticky heat to clear out. The Shasta daisies are a beautiful memory and even many of the coneflowers are looking a little long in the tooth. The non-fragrant purple flowers of the ordinary hostas have come and gone and I have lopped their scraggly stalks. I also cut back the overgrown salvia and the attenuated California poppies because they looked terrible.
The roses of Sharon and three of the four butterfly bushes are doing their bit to keep up appearances and will for another three weeks or so. The Hosta plantaginea or August lilies have buds, as do the asters and boltonia, but they aren’t ready to show their beautiful flowers yet. I love my garden, but right now I have to admit that I hate the bare spots. Once again this year I take myself out to the August garden and moan disconsolately, “I should have put in more annuals.”
This year my excuse for not doing so was better than usual. A change in my husband’s job status made it necessary to conserve resources, so my plant purchases were minimal. For a person whose motto is “when the going gets tough, the tough go to the garden center,” this was especially difficult. Happily we are in a better situation now, but I still can’t spend like a drunken sailor on a spree. After all, I have to think about my daughter’s college tuition, not to mention essentials like fall bulbs.
So earlier this week, my first thought was to plug holes with plants that are already on hand. I have lots and lots and lots of a small-flowered coreopsis called Zagreb and it is dying to be divided. Of course the divisions inevitably go through a bit of transplant shock, but they come out of it quickly and even while they are in the midst of the uglies, they cover the bare earth. I would rather make divisions of the much better looking Coreopsis Moonlight, but Zagreb is twice as vigorous. Those are the breaks–at least in my yard.
If I didn’t intervene, the garden would be nothing but large perilla mint plants. In this situation though, I removed fewer of the weedy creatures than usual and moved some of the others around to fill in the bald spots. I even pinched the thugs back to make them bushier. Now they shine forth from the large pots that flank my porch stairs, which truly speaks of desperation. At least perilla is attractive in its ubiquitousness, with fashionable purple-bronze leaves and pretty pink flower stalks. I heard a bypasser tell her companion that they were definitely coleus. I was gratified.
After making all the free, quick fixes that I could think of, I finally went to the garden center in search of bargains. I found them in the form of several pots of portulaca and one giant coleus. All my specimens were sad looking when they arrived home from the garden center, but they won’t be for long.
The late Henry Mitchell, America’s greatest garden writer, reminisced in one of his books about housewives in his native Texas who defied the withering summer heat by growing colorful annual portulaca or moss rose in old tin washtubs. Portulaca grandiflora, a relative of the edible weed purslane, is a creeping succulent plant, with small, plump leaves and bright poppy-like flowers that last only one day. The blooms absolutely shine in the hot sun.
At the garden center I found three six-inch pots of portulaca for a tiny price. These portulaca, undoubtedly remnants of plants sold in cell packs earlier in the season, looked a little tired. I knew that if I cut them back, they would have plenty of life left. After the big clip job, I’ll divide each potted portulaca tangle in half and install the plants in six holes in the fronts of various borders, where they will be happy and bloom through the end of the summer. The portulaca would have been reasonably cheap at twice the price and nobody else has to know just how cheap they really were.
I also found one giant, overgrown coleus. The red, green and yellow carnival colors of the leaves drew my eye from twenty feet away. I took it home, snipped off the flower stalks and cut the plant way back. The coleus will interpret this as a gesture of affection and respond with a new flush of bushy leaves in its adopted home in one of the shady borders. The cuttings went into a glass of water, where they will root quickly. In a few weeks they will be in the garden, providing riotous color until frost.
Once the rehabilitated bargain plants are installed, I will freshen up the worst looking beds with some new mulch and edge the ones that I haven’t gotten around to edging yet. Nothing rejuvenates a garden like mowing the surrounding grass, edging and mulching. Those who don’t know me can imagine that I had my “people” do all those chores. The gardener in me will rejoice in my newly refreshed beds and borders. My inner social climber will rejoice because my garden will once again keep up with the Joneses. After all, I walked by the Joneses place the other day, and the ten thousand impatiens that their people installed in the middle of May are looking a little leggy.