Gardeners may swill champagne along with the rest of the world at 12:01 on January 1, but most of us don’t truly feel the New Year’s spirit until the temperature starts to rise and the first snowdrops, crocuses and winter aconite pop out of the still-frozen ground. Even if a bit of snow lingers in the forecast, we look for outdoor chores while exercising our credit cards by making plant and equipment orders.
Yesterday I clipped four shivering snowdrops and brought them into the house just to get that New Year’s spirit working. They responded by opening their petals wide and exuding a beautiful fragrance. That was enough for me. I am off and running now, making “New Year’s” resolutions for the garden. Here they are:
Spin the Color Wheel
Some people are meticulous planners who sketch their gardens in advance or plot the landscape down to the square inch on graph paper of a computer screen. I admire them, but I am not one of them. The “bones” of my garden were organized long ago. Now I sometimes jot suggestions to myself and post them in prominent places. But I am a romantic and more often than not, I fall in love with certain plants or plant groups and purchase them, figuring that I will find a place to put them at the appropriate time. This makes for a constantly changing garden, but not a particularly cohesive one.
I know my basic gardening MO is not going to change, but this year I find myself longing for greater cohesion. I’ll get it by introducing some color discipline. This won’t be achieved by large-scale transplantation because I know I don’t have that in me either. Instead, I am going to fine-tune the color palettes of the various beds. One of the easiest fine-tuning tricks is to calm down the most chaotic areas by inserting groups of white-flowered plants into the beds, creating continuity and freshness. I love white cosmos, which are easy to grow in sunny spots and self-seed if they are happy. White New Guinea impatiens provide the same visual relief in shadier places.
Blues and their color wheel opposites, yellows, have always made me feel good. If I focus on blue as the main color range in most of the beds, adding more blue-toned plants, I will enhance cohesion with very little extra effort. Where blues or blue-purples already predominate, I can add in yellows or peachy-yellows as accent colors. I love the double snapdragons ‘Chantilly Yellow’ and ‘Chantilly Peach’, both of which are exceptionally easy to grow.
The color focus makes room for the inevitable—lots of love at first sight in garden centers—without complete loss of direction. It may actually save me money. Stranger things have happened.
Good Grooming
Mature gardens, like mature people should always aspire to good grooming. Many of our grandmothers said wise things like, “You can’t change crow’s feet, but you can certainly do something about your haircut.” I ignored that advice at the time it was given because I couldn’t imagine being old enough to have crow’s feet, but it has proved to be true. Likewise, some of your garden mistakes may be long-lived, but you can always improve the landscape by cutting the grass, keeping the shrubs pruned and mulching the beds.
This does not mean using a builder’s level to ensure perfection when you trim the privet, unless doing so makes you happy. It means trimming the privet before the neighbors start giving you funny looks and keeping it neat thereafter. If using the hedge trimmer for long periods of time gives you palsy-like tremors; tackle the chore in short bursts. If you hate such chores and have the money, hire someone else to do them.
I used to loathe edging the beds and borders. My garden is full of edges and the number of linear feet in need of edging always seemed daunting. On top of that, I have never had a power tool or a strapping garden helper to ease the job. Since the only thing changeable about the situation is my attitude, it is comforting to feel that attitude evolving. This year I vow that the edging will take priority over my decades-long hobby of making excuses for not doing it. As with hedge trimming, short bursts of activity work wonders. Ten minutes with the edging tool is enough to edge about ten linear feet properly. Unlike grass, edges do not grow back right away, so the satisfaction of doing the job lasts for more than a week or two. Crisp edging says “good garden grooming” like nothing else.
As always, the key with garden grooming is that you are not doing it to be virtuous; you are doing it because it makes you feel good.
I recommend spring garden resolutions, great and small. Channel the energy you feel from the lengthening days and the warmer temperatures. The efforts may minimal, but the satisfaction will always be enormous.