{"id":2160,"date":"2017-07-17T06:14:35","date_gmt":"2017-07-17T14:14:35","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=2160"},"modified":"2017-07-17T06:14:35","modified_gmt":"2017-07-17T14:14:35","slug":"landscaped-by-others","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/landscaped-by-others\/","title":{"rendered":"Landscaped by Others"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"deer<\/a>The great American garden writer, Elizabeth Lawrence, famously said, \u201cNo one gardens alone.\u201d\u00a0 The truth of those words shows in my garden every day.\u00a0 Ninety percent of the landscape and tending falls to me; the rest is done by others.\u00a0 Fortunately, given the state of my bank accounts, I don\u2019t have to pay them anything.\u00a0 They are enthusiastic\u2014sometimes over-enthusiastic–volunteers.<\/p>\n

The largest of the \u201cothers\u201d is the well-known Mr. Antlers and his crew of mostly female hangers-on.\u00a0 Their collective specialty is pruning.\u00a0 They have pruned all my asters, especially the taller ones, for years.\u00a0 Fortunately the asters appreciate this pruning, branch out as the result of it and eventually produce more blooms than unpruned plants.\u00a0 I have never known the deer to prune the plants while they are in bloom.\u00a0 Maybe the flowers taste awful, or possibly the Antlers clan likes the look of asters.\u00a0 Who knows?<\/p>\n

The deer also prune my roses, nipping off the tender flower buds and new growth, while avoiding the thorny older canes.\u00a0 This does not cause the kind of positive branching that the asters produce, but the roses eventually bloom\u2014as long as I apply deer repellant to them after the deers\u2019 initial pruning efforts.<\/p>\n

The miracle of regrowth does not happen with statuesque Oriental and Asiatic lilies, which are among the favorites of the Antlers clan.\u00a0 Once the buds are nipped off, the plants will wait an entire year before producing new ones.\u00a0 It is extremely frustrating to see the stalks standing tall and proud and know that there is no hope of blooms.\u00a0 The same is true of hostas, which the deer often nibble almost down to the ground.\u00a0 The beautiful broad leaves that make hostas a go-to plant for shady areas will not reappear until late spring next year.<\/p>\n

Groundhogs are also ace pruners, but due to their low, rotund profile, they focus on plants close to the ground.\u00a0 One year I decided to install a number of large, ornamental cabbages in the back gardens to liven things up after Labor Day.\u00a0 The groundhogs took the idea of livening things up seriously and apparently had a party with cabbage as the main course.\u00a0 Two days after I bought and installed the cabbages, they had been eaten down to ground level.\u00a0 I can only hope that all that cabbage had a dramatic effect on the groundhogs\u2019 digestion.<\/p>\n

Squirrels do not prune, they plant.\u00a0 This generally happens when spring flowering bulbs, especially small ones, are planted in the fall.\u00a0 As every suburbanite knows, squirrels like to bury their acorns, chestnuts and other food treasures.\u00a0 In the course of doing so they sometimes unearth bulbs.\u00a0 I suspect that they treat the bulbs just like acorns and rebury them in a different spot.\u00a0 In typical squirrel fashion, they never remember where anything is buried, so the stolen bulbs sprout in the squirrel-selected sites.\u00a0 I have a large stand of Crocus tommasianus in the back garden and every spring I find stray \u201ctommie\u201d crocuses blooming several feet, or sometimes several yards from the original clump.\u00a0 Once I found one in the front yard.\u00a0 Generally I just lift and replant the squirrel-sown bulbs.\u00a0 Occasionally the squirrels install bulbs in interesting places.\u00a0 When that kind of landscaping effort happens, I leave it alone.<\/p>\n

The plants themselves are sometimes the best landscapers.\u00a0 Most hardy geraniums distribute seeds by projecting them as much as three feet from the mother plant.\u00a0 The germination rate for these seeds is high, which means an abundance of new geraniums.\u00a0 My garden is the cottage type, so many of the self-sown plants stay where the seeds land.\u00a0 The surplus seedlings go elsewhere in the garden, creating desirable repetition in the planting scheme.\u00a0 Good self seeders include larkspur, nigella, morning glory, dame\u2019s rocket, columbine and rose campion.\u00a0 If you have morning glory growing up a trellis, let it set seed in the fall.\u00a0 I guarantee that you will never have to buy a fresh package of morning glory seeds and, in fact, you will have morning glories everywhere, because they are prodigious self-seeders.<\/p>\n

Growing an abundance of self-seeding plants can result in a beautiful, lush landscape that mimics growth patterns seen in the wild.\u00a0 Also, since the seedlings are the result of open pollination, you may end up with plants that bloom in slightly different colors than the parent.\u00a0 This can create a very artistic effect.\u00a0 Of course, if you like a little more discipline in the landscape, you can reposition the seedlings so they will appear as well controlled as the rest of your garden.<\/p>\n

When I am in the garden I never fail to hear the voices of the plants, whispering about history, folklore and adaptation.\u00a0 They also complain about the weather.\u00a0 In the midst of that, I swear that I also hear rustling noises just on the other side of the fence.\u00a0 I am convinced that the rustling comes from my volunteer landscapers, who are waiting impatiently to begin their work.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The great American garden writer, Elizabeth Lawrence, famously said, \u201cNo one gardens alone.\u201d\u00a0 The truth of those words shows in my garden every day.\u00a0 Ninety percent of the landscape and tending falls to me; the rest is done by others.\u00a0 Fortunately, given the state of my bank accounts, I don\u2019t have to pay them anything.\u00a0 … 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":[4,6,2,3,5],"tags":[298,257,1164,413,210,1671,1672,1670],"class_list":["post-2160","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","category-winter","tag-deer","tag-deer-resistant-plants","tag-garden-pests","tag-groundhogs","tag-hostas","tag-landscaping","tag-lilies","tag-squirrels"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2160","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=2160"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2160\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2162,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2160\/revisions\/2162"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2160"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2160"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2160"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}