{"id":294,"date":"2012-03-06T06:44:51","date_gmt":"2012-03-06T14:44:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/garden\/?p=294"},"modified":"2015-11-24T07:32:33","modified_gmt":"2015-11-24T15:32:33","slug":"eighty-days","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/eighty-days\/","title":{"rendered":"Eighty Days"},"content":{"rendered":"

EIGHTY DAYS
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\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 <\/strong>In 1883 author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days<\/em>, sending the fictional Phileas Fogg off to circumnavigate the globe in just under three months.\u00a0 That feat, though daring at the time, was small compared to the one I must pull off in my garden in the eighty days before an upcoming garden tour. \u00a0Fogg had trains, ships and elephants at his disposal, not to mention his invaluable servant Passepartout.\u00a0 I have two hands and a basketful of garden tools.\u00a0 Fogg stood to win twenty thousand pounds if he got back to England in the allotted time.\u00a0 I will win the satisfaction of knowing that I didn’t make a fool of myself in front of friends and neighbors.\u00a0 The difference between Fogg and me is that he was willing to do almost anything for a large reward.\u00a0 I am willing to do almost anything for nothing.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 We had a mild fall and winter which meant that plants with rapacious tendencies kept on growing until very late fall and started growing once again in January.\u00a0 The old French rose, ‘Gloire de Dijon’, which resides on the south side of the lot, has invaded nearby spaces in a way that would have made Napoleon proud.\u00a0 Under normal circumstances, the canes can grow to sixteen feet long.\u00a0 Some of mine are clearly overachievers.\u00a0
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When I installed the rose, I thought those canes would look lovely trained on a sturdy metal obelisk.\u00a0 I knew they would eventually get to the top of the obelisk, at which time they would cascade down and creep artistically along the ground.\u00a0 I forgot to mention that vision to ‘Gloire de Dijon’, which overwhelmed the obelisk, took off in all directions and was about to launch a take-no-prisoners attack on the neighbors’ driveway.\u00a0 I thwarted that nefarious plan with my clippers, but I may never get all the prickles out of my fingers. I need to replace my shredded garden gloves and invest in a large metal arch so that the rose can fulfill its unlimited growth potential without danger to nearby cars or people.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Just out of ‘Gloire de Dijon’s reach are four rose of Sharon shrubs that I installed to mark the boundary of the property.\u00a0 They are beautiful in mid to late summer, but are almost as thuggish as ‘Gloire de Dijon’.\u00a0 As a general rule, when the soil is good and the gardener is lazy, plants will take advantage of the situation.\u00a0 This happened with the roses of Sharon, which went untrimmed last year.\u00a0 Now they are quite woody at the bases and gangly at the tops.\u00a0 I am in the process of taming them so that when they leaf out later this spring they will be full and thick instead of tall and sparse. The work with the loppers and pruning saw has only just begun, but already I have enough bundles of branches to start a good-sized bonfire if such a thing were legal and I was so inclined.\u00a0 It is a pity that I don’t have the skills to use some of those branches to build an arch for ‘Gloire de Dijon’.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Just across the path from the rampant rose and the overblown roses of Sharon, is a sweet autumn clematis, another plant fully deserving of a place in some horticultural rogue’s gallery.\u00a0 At the moment, the sweet autumn clematis is disguised as an innocent tangle of delicate dried stems.\u00a0 You have to look very closely to see that last year it insinuated itself onto the lower branches of the neighboring twenty foot holly tree and climbed all the way to the top without even breaking a sweat.\u00a0 Right now, the tangle of clematis stems, collected from ground level and yanked out of the holly, looks like a tumbleweed. It is going to the compost pile, but I am positive that when the plant resumes growing in a few weeks, it will begin its skyward journey once more.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Reading the description of all of this rampant growth, you might think the south side of my garden is the size of Rhode Island.\u00a0 In fact, it is only about twenty percent of the total garden area.\u00a0 After I finish the lopping, pruning, sawing and hacking necessary to get the roses of Sharon, ‘Gloire de Dijon’ and the sweet autumn clematis under control, I still have to give a dramatic haircut to the ever-vigorous privet that bounds the front garden on three sides.\u00a0 The butterfly bushes need to be cut back so that by summer they will attract butterflies, not disgusted looks from the neighbors.\u00a0 There are other roses that need pruning, just as soon as I get my new gloves.
\n\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 It’s a good thing that I became a power-tool convert last year and bought an electric hedge trimmer. It might be the only tool that will get me around the overgrown shrubbery in less than eighty days.\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

EIGHTY DAYS \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 In 1883 author Jules Verne wrote Around the World in Eighty Days, sending the fictional Phileas Fogg off to circumnavigate the globe in just under three months.\u00a0 That feat, though daring at the time, was small compared to the one I must pull off in my garden in the eighty days before … 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":[6,2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-294","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-spring"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294","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=294"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1497,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/294\/revisions\/1497"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=294"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=294"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=294"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}