It is axiomatic among gardeners that the garden is always at its best either the week before or the week after visitors stop by. “You should have seen it last week,” you say regretfully while looking at the desiccated remains of your formerly sumptuous double daffodils. “Wait until next week,” you mutter, as you point out the tightly furled buds on your amazingly fragrant peonies. Of course, it follows that your garden visitors, especially those that you hope to impress, were at a funeral last week, or will be attending their children’s graduations next week.
Something similar happens with garden perfection. Even if you work doggedly at your garden, keeping it well mulched, weeded, watered and fertilized in pursuit of optimal results, there is always a worm in the horticultural apple. I cataloged the perfection preventers on my own little piece of paradise and came up with lots of them.
“My garden would be perfect,” I sigh at this time in mid spring, “if it weren’t for those daisy fleabanes.”
For those not familiar with daisy fleabane or Erigeron annuus, it is a slender annual wildflower that sprouts from a rosette of ovoid, toothed leaves and produces small, daisy-like flowers with narrow petals that are white, sometimes tinged with pink. The common name comes from the fact that the plant was once used in a concoction that worked as a flea dip for animals.
Daisy fleabane is vigorous and self seeds with wild abandon. It is also quite pretty. The problem is that it pops up everywhere and outcompetes other plants. I would eradicate it, but for every one I grub out, two new ones emerge in full bloom. I compromise by putting as many of them as possible in bouquets, therefore depriving them of the opportunity to self-seed. Somehow they do it anyway.
My garden gains points in the great race to perfection because of spiderwort, while suffering because of the same plant, which is also known as Tradescantia (Andersoniana group). Tradescantia is also descended from native plants and grows well in shade. In fact, given even the slightest encouragement, it grows just about anywhere, with long, strap-like leaves and three-petaled flowers in shades ranging from white through various purples. There is only one word for trandescantia, and that word is “rampant”. If you plant one deliberately, you will have a rambunctious clump the following year. The year after, the offspring of that rambunctious clump will show up halfway across the property. The plants self seed readily and will grow nicely, even in sidewalk cracks. The clumps seem to need dividing every ten minutes and tend to edge out the iris and shade-tolerant hardy geraniums that bloom at the same time. Spiderwort also gets very ugly once bloom time is over and needs to be cut back almost to the ground to encourage rebloom. If you let spiderwort run rampant in your garden because it looks good in May, you will be lopping its ugly remains right through July.
And, of course, my garden would be perfect if I could only trim the flowering quince back to a manageable size. The best time to prune is right after flowering. That is also the time, every year, when a couple of cardinals decide to nest in the quince.
It is the perfect nesting site, after all, with lots of green leaves to hide the next and the young cardinals, not to mention formidable thorns to discourage predators. Since the quince is such a perfect nesting site, I wouldn’t dare prune while nesting is taking place. After the young birds fledge, it is usually too hot to think about it, and in the fall I have other things to do. By the time spring rolls around again, the shrub has increased in size by fifty percent, which makes for lots of blooms and an even bigger nesting site. Garden visitors never seem to appear when the quince is in glorious flower, only afterwards, when it looks like a giant, misshapen green boulder.
And, of course, the biggest preventer of garden perfection—even bigger than ravenous deer—is weather. If you are having garden visitors, you can just about guarantee that there will be a hard rainstorm the day before, flattening the biggest, showiest plants, and bringing out swarms of insects. Even staked specimens look lackluster when they are still soggy from the previous night’s monsoon.
If drought and/or hot weather is the problem, the plants will bloom and wilt in the same day, no matter how much you water. The best time to see the garden at its freshest is generally about six am. Not everyone likes to entertain garden visitors at that hour.
The best way to ensure garden perfection is to hire a lot of well-trained garden minions to tend your beds and borders constantly. Barring that, you can take pictures of your garden at its best and show them to garden visitors in lieu of a full tour. Naturally, I aim to get excellent pictures of my garden in a pristine state, but somehow I always get distracted by something on the way to get those inspiring shots.
It’s possible that the most imperfect specimen in my garden is the gardener.