{"id":101,"date":"2008-06-30T04:45:22","date_gmt":"2008-06-30T12:45:22","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=101"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:33:02","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:33:02","slug":"restraint","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/restraint\/","title":{"rendered":"Restraint"},"content":{"rendered":"

RESTRAINT
\n<\/font><\/font><\/strong>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>I went over the edge last week.\u00a0 So did ‘<\/strong>City of York’, a climbing rose with large white flowers that grows in a raised bed next to my garage. The expansive shrub was attached to a trellis that was in turn screwed into the garage wall.\u00a0 This spring’s weekly wind-storms had apparently loosened the screws, and last week the arbor and the garage wall parted company.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 While I was risking life and limb to get the trellis and the rose back up, I noticed that a lot of perfectly good plants were lurking by the garage wall, overlooked and unappreciated.\u00a0 Stuck behind flourishing rose bushes, the motley assortment of iris, coronaria and Stokesia reminded me of the famous line from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard”\u009d:<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 “Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
\n<\/em><\/font><\/font>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And waste its sweetness on the desert air.”\u009d
\n<\/font><\/font><\/em>\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Clearly I had more than a few flowers that were wasting their sweetness in the New Jersey air.\u00a0 The raised bed and most of the rest of the garden need serious editing.\u00a0 Now I can’t rest until I get it done.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 How did this happen?\u00a0 The answer comes down to time and unbridled plant lust.\u00a0 I can make excellent garden plans for others, but when it comes to my own place, I am just a collector looking for an empty spot to stash an acquisition.\u00a0 I frequently move plants around after the fact to create pleasing combinations and sometimes those combinations add up to a bed or border that looks planned.\u00a0 At day’s end though, the collector in me trumps the garden planner every time. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Time is the gardener’s great friend.\u00a0 It turns tiny little ‘Nikko Blue’ hydrangea plants into magnificent specimens that cover themselves with scores of bright blue flowerheads.\u00a0 The problem is that now the full-grown shrubs also cover some of the lovely yellow foxgloves that I planted nearby.\u00a0 If those foxgloves are ever to get the appreciation they deserve, they will have to be moved.<\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The story is the same everywhere I look.\u00a0 Never have so many healthy plants worked so hard to elbow aside their equally healthy neighbors.\u00a0 Yarrow flops over onto a clump of campanula and both are overshadowed by an enormous rosebush.\u00a0 An enthusiastic abelia swamps a more reticent bridal veil spirea. \u00a0Privet reaches out to challenge daylilies and a flowering quince is competing with a sweet autumn clematis to overpower some innocent garden pinks. <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

The world is full of interesting and desirable plants, and that’s the problem.\u00a0 I may not be able to emulate the great plant hunters and go in person to pluck the exotic ones that grow only on Chinese cliffs, but I can make use of my car and the Internet to obtain hundreds of wonderful specimens.\u00a0 They all need a place to grow.<\/font><\/p>\n

My plant lust makes it easy to understand the motivations of great conquerors like Alexander and Napoleon.\u00a0 If all I had to do is take a few horses and a few troops and annex some additional property, I would be strongly tempted to do so.\u00a0 Covering the new property with garden beds would give me lots more room for plant acquisitions.\u00a0 No doubt this is exactly what Josephine, a great plant lover, said to Napoleon back in his glory days.<\/font><\/p>\n

If I think about my entire garden and the need to edit every bed, I get so intimidated that I don’t want to start.\u00a0 Instead, I take one bed or area at a time.\u00a0 I have started lifting and dividing the iris, which are outcompeting even themselves, not to mention struggling with the surrounding plants.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

I now have enough iris divisions to start my own botanical garden.\u00a0 <\/font><\/font><\/p>\n

After I finish the iris, I will take on the front borders, where the ‘Alma Potschke’ asters and Shasta daisies are making life difficult for the roses.\u00a0 The only thing that stops the asters in their tracks is the self-sown perilla mint.\u00a0 Most of that is going away as well.<\/font><\/p>\n

As I edit the beds, thinning things out and making more cohesive combinations, I will also lay down more mulch so that the weeds don’t take my efforts as an open invitation to be fruitful and multiply.<\/font><\/p>\n

Good editing makes writing and gardens better.\u00a0 It may even work in my house.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

RESTRAINT \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I went over the edge last week.\u00a0 So did ‘City of York’, a climbing rose with large white flowers that grows in a raised bed next to my garage. The expansive shrub was attached to a trellis that was in turn screwed into the garage wall.\u00a0 This spring’s weekly wind-storms had apparently loosened … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-101","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-summer"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1681,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101\/revisions\/1681"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}