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| Since the weather started to cool down back in late September I've been working a good deal in the big garden; in the hopeless, awful, sun-blasted, wind-whipped big garden. Back in August it all looked dead. This was a poor year for roses, lots of cane damage, not much bloom. I know by now that the warm climate roses require very extensive soil amendment--great big holes, and lots of decomposed hay added--and if they don't get it, when an unusually wet winter comes along their roots rot and they die. I planted quite a few without adequate soil amendment before I figured this out, and am paying for it still. 'Anna Jung', that was so beautiful in the fall, is reduced to one diseased cane. I had been going back and reworking the soil around many suffering roses but didn't do that one because it was so thriving. This was a mistake. Perhaps it was root damage that stressed the roses and made them so susceptible to cane girdler over the summer. Anyway I knew I had to face the music, that is, start cleaning up the big garden, and each area was more distressing than the last. We have one corner I wrote off a few years ago. It's a pile of rocks with a stunted walnut growing out it, with the compacted soil of the road on one side and pottery-quality gray clay and elms on the other. Years ago DH had a load of soil hauled in and dumped over the rocks, to discourage snakes living there; I planted various things that got overgrown with Bermuda grass. Then some years later the ground dropped 2'-3' vertical feet in a slump, a demoralizing experience. This year the walnut died. To my surprise, though, when I looked at it this fall, I found the buddleia, phlomis, vitex, box, Salvia 'Hotlips' alive and happy, as well as the well-established rosemary, newish lilac, and last fall's Italian cypress (for which I dug an impressive hole); the palm, eleagnus, loquat, and lentiscus planted years ago: all doing fine. This was inspiring. I pulled and dug out quantities of Bermuda grass and added shrub germander, thyme, more rosemary, another phlomis, a pile of seedling evergreen oaks, in the hopes of a background of evergreen woodland to my dry sunny plantings, and a house eating rose next to the dead tree. Cleaned up the half-overwhelmed lavender, shifted a daisy subshrub and some iris as part of the emerging plan, and began to entertain hopes that I might actually have a garden here one day. Autumn is a hopeful time in this part of the world. The grass and little herbs sprout and grow green and lush, even as berries and hips ripen and leaves change color and fall. My pink dahlia is blooming along with the electric violet-blue of Salvia guaranitica, and the cyclamen, which have been in bloom since September, are still making a show. Fall is when I do almost all my digging and planting, so that plants have all winter and spring to settle in before the summer drought arrives. There seems some point to cleaning up now (I wish DH hadn't put away the motor scythe for the winter), unlike in the desert of summer. Normally this phase has passed by now, given way to the dismal chill gray of November, but we've had a very mild fall this year and it's still pretty. The last couple of days I've been working my way up the Tea Biscione, an early and frustrating planting that I had also largely written off as hopeless. It was satisfying to find that the tree peony that I thought had been overtaken by its herbaceous rootstock had a healthy growth of woody stems; and I was able to find and cut out the buds of the suckering rootstock. One of the seedling palms we planted years ago is still alive. (I wish I had more of these now. I would like a palm grove.) There was a hypericum buried in the grass, along with some hyssop I had forgotten about. 'Mme. Laurette Messimy' planted years ago and left to its own devices is healthy and growing. The baby privet and Osmarea both survived the summer. And the rich covering of grass which is duly smothering the aromatic subshrubs suggests that the ground has considerably improved in fertility: it never looked this good before. I dug two more rose holes, adding lots of old hay, and am now pondering happily on which of my cutting-grown roses to plant. Last fall's cuttings were another massacre, but even a sorry ten percent success rate with three hundred cuttings gives me some roses to find spots for. We need much lighter soil in the propagation beds. Melissa |
Follow-Up Postings:
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| One of the greatest joys in gardening is finding a plant that had been long lost or given up for dead. It gives an inkling of how the father of the prodigal son must have felt. And you are finding whole sections of garden. It is good to hear you enjoying the pleasures of autumn. Cath |
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| Melissa, all in all this sounds very hopeful. You've put in a great deal of work with all the new plantings you've put into the area where the walnut died, and a really heartening number of your prior plants have survived. That in itself is helpful because you can see what plants do well for you and can use that knowledge to embellish other areas of your property. I know you've had cloudy, depressing weather lately and I'm so glad that you're now enjoying some late-autumn sunshine with still mild temperatures. You definitely will have a garden. Your hard work and intrepid spirit will ensure that. Ingrid |
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| Always interesting to hear about your shrubby adventures since, as you have pointed out, these are somewhat unexplored in my gardening styles (apart from deutzia, of which I have quite a few). Although yours are mainly garrigue or maquis type shrubs, and likely to be very different to my woodland efforts, it really does add a whole different level (and substance) to gardening - something lacking in my airy, but scruffy plantings. Although I couldn't quite see my engaging in topiary, I do think that there will be a need to anchor the trees and huge Norfolk skies, to the flat and open ground level.....and I am choosing shrubs with berries, namely viburnums, cotoneasters, pyracantha, sorbus and roses with great heps. Can hardly wait - hardwood cuttings any day now. Another aspect of your garden I would find both fascinating but challenging - the topology. My whole gardening life has been conducted in a landscape which is utterly flat, low-lying, treeless and huge - a sort of fenland prairie with more water....and would not know how to cope with levels - well, terraces, I suppose....but that's a lot of earth moving, retaining walls and in a landscape which periodically decides to wander, quite terrifyingly unpredictable. So respect - your tenacity always inspires me to get on with it and I especially like your honest complaints, mood swings and even moments of faint despair. Having an early bedtime since it is tree felling day tomorrow - we are up at first light, ready to trundle off to Norfolk with the chainsaw and the last few hundred foxgloves, forget-me-nots and meconopsis to get in the ground while there is still a bit of warmth left. Life is much harder to eradicate than we might think (look at the weeds to prove it thriving despite every effort at weedicide). |
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| When I moved to VA from Santa Fe, NM, all I could see was that everything was green, growing wildly, tons of water, even the clay soil looked good after sand and hard pan. There was sun, shade, gentle slopes, four real seasons...I planted anything I fancied. Ha! If I knew then...There are critters and diseases and fungi, rotten roots and tree roots, weeds without end. Needless to say, there have been lots of revisions. But when it works, when I finally get it right, it's glorious. |
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- Posted by melissa_thefarm NItaly (My Page) on Mon, Nov 11, 13 at 0:51
| Thanks for these well-felt and well-thought answers. Ingrid, I think you know all about gardening uphill, and are speaking from much personal experience. Cath, I always enjoy your remarks. I seem to recall in that parable that Jesus said that God is happier for one soul reclaimed than for the hundred that never strayed. There really is something to that as regards plants that lived after all. I was particularly pleased about my tree peony, which I had pretty much written off. Catsrose, I can well believe it. No one gardens in Heaven. I actually regard myself as extremely fortunate in my conditions, but I would have done a lot differently had I known at the start what I know now about my land. Many parts of the eastern central U.S. are wonderfully beautiful...though so is New Mexico, in a different way. Gardening is adaptation. Suzy, the Norfolk landscape you describe is the English equivalent of the Florida coastal landscape I grew up in. We lived far enough away from the Gulf that we didn't worry about hurricanes washing us away, but we spent plenty of time close to the water. Those expanses of marsh and river and salt water, alternating with pine forest, with the vast changeable sky above, are as beautiful as anything I've ever seen. And shrubs are an important part of this natural landscape. The area I described in my last post is one of the few we have with thin soil over stones and therefore good drainage, and then there's the poorly drained gray clay of the rest of the big garden. Garrigue and maquis are probably what is called the "macchia" in Italian, plant communites growing in impoverished soil in sun (a very rough definition). They're the plants that do best in this part of the garden, while the shade garden, moister, cooler, and in part better supplied with organic matter, looks, to my ignorant eyes, very "English", with its box and yew, lilacs, old roses and peonies. The sunny garden I sometimes call Tuscany in Piacenza, as Italian cypresses and pines thrive there. These are common in this area, not just in our garden, but are classic in central Italy. When I see how easily they grow I understand their popularity. These gray-foliaged, summer drought plants that can handle poor soil have their own beauty, of course, and help create the character of the sunny garden. The Teas and Chinas can do well there, too, if I just amend sufficiently. Glad to hear you're starting on shrubs! I wish I could grow viburnums, at least better than I do. Berries do have a lot of ornamental value, besides supplying food for the birds. I notice that here as we have little fall color (and few native evergreens, too): their bright and glossy reds, oranges, and yellows stand out in autumn. About topography, I was intimidated when I started, too, and still don't know how well I exploited the potential of the site; but I think if I can get the cultivation issues under control--and keep the whole garden from sliding to the bottom of the valley--that I'll be satisfied with my vistas. For slides, we are mainly relying on plants holding the ground in place, and planting lots of trees, as I said. It may not work, but has the best chance of anything of succeeding, I believe. From an aesthetic point of view, it's amazing how important terracing is. Just leveling a section of ground turns it from a collection of plants into a garden: I've seen it happen. And of course terracing is needed to allow comfortable walking and stopping (it's hard to relax if you're bracing yourself against gravity), as well as for both drainage and retaining water. And steps, the natural companions of terracing, greatly help make a garden a garden. Melissa |
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| I have been looking at National Trust Prints under the "Garden" heading. It is great good fun but also I am doing it to understand garden design better than I do. When I find something that I really like, I go to Google images of it. I have been looking at Peckover House which was owned by a Quaker banking family and have been struck by how important it is to have the character of the garden fit the house, that is, the degree of formality and the scale of the plantings and even the individual plants. Some other, larger mansions had huge rhododendrons and it looked so right. This is a degree of refinement that I will probably never attain... but it can't hurt. Cath |
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| Melissa, I think you should save your posts and put them in a book. Trish. |
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| and you wouldn't be the only one telling her that, Titian (great name - are you a redhead?) We have even been (vaguely, teasingly) promised....... We all await the next installment of Piacenza Picaresque |
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| Melissa, a book with photos of what you're talking about - I would buy that. A friend of mine had a book published in China, lots of photos, good quality, sold it for $30. Campanula, I used to be a redhead, but it's also the name of a favourite rose, bred in Australia. Trish. |
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- Posted by sherryocala 9A Florida (My Page) on Mon, Nov 11, 13 at 20:36
| Melissa, you describe so well the ongoing struggle that anyone who deals with nature and the ground faces, and you also reminded me of the indomitable spirit of human beings and our will to master the land that is given to us. Whether we have .17 acre or 20 acres or 400, we fight nature every step of the way. I don't know how farmers do it what with bugs and blights, floods and droughts and killing winds. It's disheartening to me just thinking about them, and you were disheartened looking at your sun-blasted big garden last August but you dove in - for better or for worse. I applaud you...and learn from you. It seems to me (now that I'm prompted by your post) that gardens (and farms) are very temporal things. One at least hopes for a same season bloom or harvest. To hope for successive, successful seasons may be pushing our luck, especially in some places, and yet gardens do perpetuate for years and years. In the tough locations nature is greedy to get back to her old ways and will fight us for every inch of ground, and you aren't the first to start out in the wrong direction with an ill-fitting plan for your particular plot. I'd love to read about the first gardens of the world-renowned gardeners and see how they fared and what mistakes they made. Unless a person stays his whole life in one gardening environment and learns it from birth, mistakes will be made that were beautiful successes in the last garden. In this endeavor (except for the cash expense) the mistakes are every bit as profitable as the successes, and I think we should probably be more philosophical (as you have been) about it all. It's not that it's NOT about the one lost plant, but it is about the whole more than the individual. I remember my first gardening year I thought everything would stay the same and wanted it to. The changes that nature threw my way seemed like they would knock me down, but they didn't, and now I see that adjusting to nature is part of it along with fighting on. And gardening is more than filling a bed with some plants from Lowe's. It's taking the land you have and working it and living it to find what will thrive in it, what will give back a beauty that is exceedingly appropriate for that land and maybe a bit surprising, too, and sometimes that takes a lifetime - hopefully. Detours and setbacks are just steps along the way. My dear DIL weeded hard with me (harder than me - I do think I've learned to weed leisurely) for three hours yesterday, and we got the back garden tamed - not perfect. A good blowing would go a long way to almost perfect (except for the roses) but would also reveal what we missed. And I have newfound hope for the garden. I found dead ones and unexpected living ones under the weeds (well, one of each). Who knows what the future has for my garden, but I will continue puttering in it - at times. It was good to be in it and thinking about it even just for three hours, and I know I want to put SDLM where Pretty Jessica was, so I'll be buying at least one new rose. I enjoy your discussion of shrubs and sub-shrubs even as foreign as most of the names are. Hopefully, my brain will retain it for future use. Your post should be mandatory reading for every new gardener. Sherry |
Here is a link that might be useful: If only sweat were irrigation...
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- Posted by lavender_lass WA zone 4 (My Page) on Mon, Nov 11, 13 at 22:39
| Learning to work with nature (rather than against it) is my favorite thing about gardening. I enjoy the challenge of finding the right plant, to appreciate the cold winter, heavy clay, visiting deer, etc. There are a LOT of roses that might grow, but would not thrive, in our area. I've decided to stick with the ones that do beautifully in our area and not try to baby the ones that don't. It's fun to see what other people can grow in their gardens...which is one of the reasons I visit this forum :) |
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- Posted by harborrose 8-Puget Sound/PNW (My Page) on Tue, Nov 12, 13 at 0:38
| Melissa, Something new to me are 'hugelkultur' beds. I've learned they are a way of building beds using old or rotting wood as the base of the bed with a layer of soil over. It reminds me of lasagna beds a little. The wood rots, enriching the soil. Apparently the wood, being fairly well rotted anyway, doesn't suck the nitrogen from the soil but is to the point of releasing the nutrients. Anyway, I am not sure if surplus or rotting wood is available to you but did wonder if it wouldn't be a way of enriching your soil. If nothing else, it's another interesting way of looking at soil building. We removed the soil in one of our raised beds we grow veges in and added a layer of rotting wood in the bottom and then added the soil back over it. I happened to think of mentioning the hugelkultur beds when you said you needed lighter soil in your propagation beds. Maybe this would do the trick. I agree that gardening is adaptation - we use what we have. Just thinking about your hay mulch, I wonder if adding a layer of hay mulch in the bottom of your propagation bed and then adding soil on top of that in your propagation bed wouldn't approximate the hugelkultur beds. When we first built those raised beds the bottom foot was old leaves. After two years it's rich soil, but it's sunk down as the leaves have decayed so we added the logs under the soil. Anyway, just a thought. And, I disagree, I know that you do now have a garden. Like most of us, though, in both easier and harder climates, it is not the garden we quite want. This is the easiest climate I've ever gardened in, but I am not sure I am happier here in this garden than I was fighting for roses in north Alabama or in north Texas or even trying to think how to grow roses in a deer infested neighborhood in Colorado. It's the fight, the thinking, the dirt, the work of forcing the picture in my mind on a slowly yielding landscape that is the challenge and the joy. Your prose is always a pleasure to read, as it well captures your struggles. Gardeners resonate with that passion and struggle to some degree or another, I think. |
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- Posted by jeannie2009 PNW 7/8 (My Page) on Tue, Nov 12, 13 at 9:20
| Melissa, Thank You for your thought provoking post. You are an exceptional gardener and have a sharing skill that is supberb. |
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- Posted by kittymoonbeam 10 (My Page) on Wed, Nov 13, 13 at 9:02
| I'm happy that you found your plants again in the grass. If I stopped watering, I wouldn't have anything left except the three big trees. I have seen it happen to houses that were owned by the bank after the financial crisis and it's a sad thing to see. New people come and start all over. Of course they have the benefit of the improved soil. Mostly it becomes palms and a new sod lawn with some few shrubs. I haven't seen anyone plant a lawn from seed in years because the sod is cheap and easy to get. The growers deliver big piles of it twice a week and it's taken right away by mow and blow guys who are self educated lawn installation crews trying to add extra income. What usually happens is that the old bermuda resurfaces to reclaim the sod lawn in a few years after thin spots develop due to summer heat and insufficient water and these same mow and go crews bring in all kinds of weeds on their equipment as they go from place to place. Eventually what remains is a mixed grass and weed lawn that is mostly green except for summer and when the house goes up for sale, the weeds will be sprayed and the grass fed and watered or else the new owner hires mow crew guys to strip off the old stuff and the entire cycle begins again. It's a joyful sight to find a plant that wanted to live. My Jude the Obscure died away and I planted a Charlotte right next to the spot where Jude was. Years later I saw a big cane with Jude flowers ( Hey, Jude! ) growing right out of the edge of Charlotte. That was a happy day. Little plants I loved that reappeared from seeds bring joy too. You just never know when the weather will take some plant you loved so I'm learning to do more propagation. I have a silvery pink-lilac chrysanthemum that I call Bella. I have at least 5 copies just in case. I found her at a market in the florist section and have never seen her since. I couldn't imagine fall without Bella. I have since gotten some show quality Chrysanthemums but I still love my Bella the best. I would love to grow a Peony. You can think of me while cutting off the suckers. Yesterday I was turning over the soil where I buried a great layering of leaves and grass in summer and adding some sifted soil I got from the neighbors. Funny to think of getting some soil from my best friend's childhood home to add to the garden. What are they going to do with the garden after the new cement cures? The mow guys that come to the house next door are putting down sod! At least they aren't trying to do it in August. |
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- Posted by melissa_thefarm NItaly (My Page) on Thu, Nov 14, 13 at 2:18
| "And I have newfound hope for the garden." Sherry, that says it all. Your post perfectly expresses my own thoughts about gardening and sums up what it can teach us: that we must both struggle and adapt; that life is change; that while there is always loss there is always also renewal; that living organisms struggle mightily to survive, and succeed more often than we might have expected. You've been through hard and frightening times lately, and I wonder if your experiences in gardening turned out to have any meaning when you were so worried about your husband? Applying lessons in philosophy to life is terribly difficult. I don't know whether I would be able to do so, but I do know that, in the garden at least, I've learned to accept the idea of change. Plants grow, and crowd other plants; a tree blows over, and sun bakes a part of the garden it never reached before; I mulch and mulch, the grass grows for years, the earth becomes softer and earthworms arrive; cane girdler shows up and devastates the roses; a wet winter comes and provokes a major slide; I plan a romantic ravine on the site of said slide. And so on and on. Gardening is life, really. I hope I'll never reach the point where I don't want to grow things any more, because I fear it would mean I had spiritually died. About all the plants I talk about that you don't know. North and Central Florida have a soil and climate that don't have many equivalents in other parts of the world, at least, not ones well published in the annals of horticulture. Florida's too hot and humid for many temperate climate plants; too wet in summer for those adapted to Mediterranean conditions; too cold, with its occasional sharp freezes, for tropicals. So the plants belonging to the great gardening traditions of continental Europe, of Great Britain, and of the Mediterranean basin, of the various tropical zones of the world, much of the time don't work. There are nurserymen (and -women), horticulturalists, and gardeners who do a lot of research looking for plants adapted to Florida conditions, and find them, but the plants aren't handed to them on a plate. My sisters' coastal north Florida gardens, with their gingers, cycads, hardy citrus, huge agaves, Sabal palms and live oaks and hickories, contain hardly a plant I could grow here. But their gardens are beautiful. Congratulations on your getting back to your garden, and on finding out that it was still there! And on having a daughter-in-law who helps you. I live next door to dairy farmers. In my experience they rely on lots of big machines, government price supports and subsidies, a reasonable amount of technical expertise, and a great deal of steady, ongoing, hard physical labor. Lavender Lass, I wholeheartedly agree. I wish I could find words to express my delight in gardening in cooperation with Nature, my intelligence spreading its wings as I attempt to read and understand the conditions of my land. Gean, the Hugelkultur sounds interesting--I'd never heard of it--but my heart faints within me at the thought of digging out an entire bed to fill the bottom of it with rotting wood, even if we had much of that material. We don't have anything like enough decomposing organic matter available. Jeannie, thanks for saying so. I care about my writing; and I love it when others respond. That's beautiful. Kitty, I want to answer your post but must put it off. My assistant is coming to help in the garden and I need to change. It's supposed to start raining this afternoon; I believe fall, as in gloom and chill, has finally come. The garden has greened up amazingly in the last month and has been a pleasure to see and work in. Melissa |
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