My collections of garden books and garden weeds are roughly the same size.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t learned much from the weeds–except that they are eternal–but I have learned a lot from the books.<\/p>\n
There are some lessons, though, that only experience can teach.\u00a0 Here are a few of them.<\/p>\n
Self Seeding vs. Self Preservation\u2014<\/strong>If you have a cottage-type garden, you know all about self seeding plants, including prolific creatures like larkspur, rose campion, forget-me-not, perilla mint and nigella.\u00a0 When your garden is new, these plants are a godsend, filling up space and requiring little maintenance.\u00a0 But by the time your garden is five or six years old, the self-seeders show their true colors, popping up everywhere, including the sidewalk cracks.\u00a0 When I was a young gardener, I thought that lightening would strike me dead if I pulled up an unwanted seedling.\u00a0 If I managed to avoid the lightening bolts, the garden spirits would certainly take their revenge by killing off the more desirable plants.<\/p>\n One day I got so disgusted with the hundreds of \u2018Alma Potschke\u2019 aster seedlings that I pulled out about fifteen at one time.\u00a0 I waited for the lightening bolt, but it never came.\u00a0 Emboldened I pulled out many more of \u2018Alma\u2019s offspring, until the remaining asters were clustered nicely in areas where they would have the greatest impact.\u00a0 The desirable plants stayed healthy, as did my new attitude towards self-sown annuals.<\/p>\n Deadheading<\/strong>\u2014Scrupulous gardeners deadhead or get rid of wilted flowers regularly to keep beds, borders and pots looking fresh.\u00a0 The practice also encourages annuals and some perennials to rebloom.\u00a0 The downside of deadheading is that it eats up precious time.\u00a0 As in all things, balance is the key.\u00a0 Some flowers, like poppies, Japanese anemones and coneflowers, die very elegantly, shedding their petals one by one, until only the ripening seedheads or pods remain.\u00a0 Other flower, like traditional petunias and some roses, turn into ugly brown balls that cling to the plants, bearing silent witness to your slovenly garden housekeeping.<\/p>\n If you really hate deadheading, focus on buying varieties that die gracefully.\u00a0 If, like me, you succumb to plant-buying frenzies and fail to consider such things, deadhead as you can.\u00a0 When I am doing my daily walk around the garden, I try to remove at least ten spent flowerheads.\u00a0 You won\u2019t get them all by doing this, but you can remove the most noticeable ones.\u00a0 This practice also allows you to be philosophical about the ephemeral nature of life and the necessity of seeing real ugliness\u2014like flaccid daylily remains\u2014in order to appreciate beauty.\u00a0 Having a trove of these deep insights in the back of your mind is a real help when have to deal with pretentious people at parties.<\/p>\n Failure\u2014<\/strong>Experience has taught me that loving a plant does not mean you can grow it successfully.\u00a0 I adore fragrant sweet peas, tall delphiniums and robust lupines, but I haven\u2019t had much success with any of them.\u00a0 A couple of years ago I bought some delphiniums that were billed as being fairly tolerant of my area\u2019s heat and humidity.\u00a0 Like good soldiers, they have returned every year.\u00a0 They may be tolerant, but they are not setting any records for height or bloom size.\u00a0 The delphiniums are doing well enough so that I would feel guilty composting them, but not well enough to make me happy.\u00a0 The real lesson may be that it is foolish to let delphiniums create existential dilemmas.<\/p>\n If I focused all my energies on growing ornamental sweet peas, I could probably do it well.\u00a0 However, I can have absolutely gorgeous roses with much less effort.\u00a0 Laziness trumps romantic longings once again.<\/p>\n Expect Serendipity: <\/strong>Unexpectedly good things happen all the time in gardens.\u00a0 For example, every year birds excrete the seeds of sweet autumn clematis all over my yard.\u00a0 I grub out or mow over the unwanted seedlings, but I have dug up a few and planted them in strategic places.\u00a0 They wander up the holly tree and meander around one of the beds, looking like cascades of stars when they bloom.\u00a0 I cut the clematis back hard in the fall and they return, full of vigor in the spring.<\/p>\n Five years ago I got some free Frittilaria meleagris or guinea hen flower bulbs.\u00a0 I was never really attracted to the checkered, tulip-like spring bloomers, so I put the bulbs in the ground near a hydrangea and forgot about them.\u00a0 This year, my original three had increased into a pretty little clump and by next spring there will be even more.\u00a0 I also take great pleasure in a stand of alluring campanulas that are evidently descended from a single specimen plant that I don\u2019t even remember acquiring.\u00a0 My buying frenzies generally make it impractical to note every purchase in my garden diary and lists of purchases are prosaic anyway.\u00a0 It\u2019s much better to use the diary to wax rhapsodic about unexpected botanical benisons.<\/p>\n There are lots of rules about planting tomatoes, making compost and staking bean plants.\u00a0 There are no rules about reaping quantities of joy in your garden.\u00a0 You have to make up your own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" My collections of garden books and garden weeds are roughly the same size.\u00a0 I haven\u2019t learned much from the weeds–except that they are eternal–but I have learned a lot from the books. There are some lessons, though, that only experience can teach.\u00a0 Here are a few of them. Self Seeding vs. Self Preservation\u2014If you have … 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":[6,2,3],"tags":[45,42,40,44,41,43],"class_list":["post-412","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general-interest","category-spring","category-summer","tag-cottage-gardening","tag-deadheading","tag-gardening-lessons","tag-low-stress-gardening","tag-self-seeding","tag-serendipity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412","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=412"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":413,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/412\/revisions\/413"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=412"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=412"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gardenersapprentice.com\/gardeningtips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=412"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}