{"id":3427,"date":"2021-06-21T07:10:39","date_gmt":"2021-06-21T15:10:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/?p=3427"},"modified":"2021-06-21T07:10:39","modified_gmt":"2021-06-21T15:10:39","slug":"editing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/editing\/","title":{"rendered":"Editing"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Asters<\/a>Not long ago, Scott Kunst, founder of heirloom bulb purveyor, Old House Gardens, wrote up his simple rules for gardening.\u00a0 Among the most notable were: \u201cweeding is endless–learn to love it\u201d; and \u201cediting is more important than planting. \u201c<\/p>\n

I may not love weeding, but most of the time I enjoy it and relish the neat and tidy results.\u00a0 The only thing that I don\u2019t enjoy is the limited amount of time I have to spend weeding.\u00a0 The dandelions, chickweed, onion grass and lamb\u2019s quarters are always ahead of me.\u00a0 If I were extremely paranoid, I would say that I sometimes hear them laughing at me.\u00a0 However, I am not that far gone\u2026yet.<\/p>\n

Editing is something that I have learned to value over time, and I think many gardeners are in the same boat.<\/p>\n

When I started serious gardening, I had lots of ground to cover and wanted as many flowers as possible.\u00a0 I especially loved the big romantic performers like roses, lilies and peonies.\u00a0 My desire for big, beautiful plants was endless.\u00a0 Fortunately my pocketbook was limited.\u00a0 Still, I acquired as many flowering specimens, especially perennials, as I could.\u00a0 After a few years, I had enough to keep bouquets in my house throughout the growing season.\u00a0 After a few more years, I had so many plants that they were starting to crowd each other out.<\/p>\n

How did this happen?\u00a0 Happy perennials multiply.\u00a0 One tradescantia can easily morph into thirty while you are looking the other way.\u00a0 Hostas and hellebores give birth.\u00a0 Lilies produce numerous offspring under cover of darkness and dirt.\u00a0 Yarrow produces bouncing baby yarrows.\u00a0 Even annuals and biennials, like foxgloves and columbines, set lots of seed, doubling or tripling their numbers every year.<\/p>\n

In the beginning I dealt with this population explosion by increasing the size of my garden beds.\u00a0 By doing that and dividing the prolific perennials, I prevented riots among the plants.\u00a0 After awhile though, things reached the point where I had to either annex my neighbor\u2019s property or edit my planting scheme.<\/p>\n

My neighbor did not seem willing.<\/p>\n

At first this felt like sacrilege.\u00a0 When you spend years trying to keep plants from dying, it takes a philosophical shift to bring yourself to the point where you can remove some plants and donate them to friends, relatives, or even the compost pile.<\/p>\n

Rather than having an existential crisis, I started the editing process with the most prolific plant on my place\u2014Aster \u2018Alma Potschke\u2019.\u00a0 \u2018Alma\u2019 is a tall, New England type aster with blooms in shades of pink.\u00a0 A few years ago taxonomists moved all the New England asters into a new genus, Symphyotrichum.\u00a0 This fazed me a bit, but did nothing to faze \u2018Alma\u2019, which continued to form clumps, spread seed and entice the local deer.<\/p>\n

Those deer, whom I curse for dining on my rosebuds, crop the asters regularly.\u00a0 Instead of killing them off, deer depredation forces the plants to branch out, producing even more seed-bearing blooms.\u00a0 My garden looks like a pink haze in the fall, interrupted by the blue haze of the prolific Aster x frikartii \u2018Monch\u2019.\u00a0 This is glorious for a couple of weeks, but the garden is not all about the asters.\u00a0 Besides, if the truth be told, \u2018Alma\u2019 is rather leggy and uninspiring the rest of the growing season.<\/p>\n

Over the years, \u2018Alma\u2019 has careened through the garden, inserting itself into patches of yarrow, overshadowing the rose bushes and even trying to muscle in on the tradescantia, which generally grows in the shady spots that a lady like \u2018Alma\u2019 should avoid.<\/p>\n

I started the editing by removing the plants around the roses and in the midst of other plant groupings.\u00a0 I took out weak, spindly asters and thinned clumps.\u00a0 I decided where the asters looked best and eliminated them elsewhere.\u00a0 I also decided not to feel guilty.\u00a0 After all, editing \u2018Alma Potschke\u2019 is like getting a bold new haircut.\u00a0 If either decision turns out to be a mistake, the hair and\/or asters will grow back.<\/p>\n

So editing continues apace.\u00a0 After the daylilies bloom, some of them will hit the road as well.\u00a0 I have far too many \u2018Black-Eyed Stella\u2019, a prolific offspring of \u2018Stella de Oro\u2019.\u00a0 I think the woman who oversees the garden beds at my church will want at least some of them.\u00a0 I would rather have more \u2018Hyperion\u2019, a tall, lemon-scented daylily introduced in 1925.\u00a0 It doesn\u2019t reproduce nearly as fast as \u2018Black-Eyed Stella\u2019, but I will use divisions from my big existing clump to fill a few of the holes left behind when \u2018Stella\u2019 departs.<\/p>\n

Pruning is another form of editing and it scares some people nearly to death.\u00a0 I used to be that way, but the fast-and-furious flowering quince in the front yard converted me.\u00a0 If I don\u2019t prune it, not only does it grow to behemoth size, but the sweet autumn clematis that scales its heights every year grows even more aggressively.<\/p>\n

I will always buy a few new plants, but now the acquisition-to-editing ration has changed in favor of editing.\u00a0 The remaining plants will sigh with relief and I am quite sure that the local deer will still have plenty of \u2018Alma Potschke\u2019 to temporarily satisfy their insatiable appetites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Not long ago, Scott Kunst, founder of heirloom bulb purveyor, Old House Gardens, wrote up his simple rules for gardening.\u00a0 Among the most notable were: \u201cweeding is endless–learn to love it\u201d; and \u201cediting is more important than planting. \u201c I may not love weeding, but most of the time I enjoy it and relish the … 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],"tags":[2534,46,863,2533,81,1114,1456],"class_list":["post-3427","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fall","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-alma-potschke-asters","tag-daylilies","tag-garden-design","tag-garden-editing","tag-pruning","tag-self-seeding-plants","tag-vigorous-plants"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3427","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=3427"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3427\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3429,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3427\/revisions\/3429"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3427"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3427"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3427"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}