Garden Lessons Learned: Spring 2011

This post was writen for the Garden Lessons Learned meme hosted by Beth at  Plant Postings.


Because I have been gardening for so long I sometimes think I should never make any gardening mistakes or have any failures. The truth is that I still make mistakes and probably always will. But most of my garden failures are not accidental mistakes, but the result of bad habits that I keep repeating, despite twenty-five years of experience. Here are three bad habits that have caused problems for me this spring.  I am sharing them here in the hope that this will mean the end of them and that I will finally learn my lesson.

So, Bad Garden Habit #1: keeping plants too long in the hope that they’ll get better if I just give them time.

You see, I think about a plant or plants I really want to grow, I research them to see what conditions they like and where I should plant them, I buy them and put them into the ground with great hopes. Often they live up to my hopes, even do better than I expected, but not always.  Sometimes they just sit there, hardly growing, hardly flowering, for weeks and months and even years. A wiser gardener would get rid of them as soon as they realized things weren’t working out, but I find this almost impossible. I keep wanting to give them one more season, one more chance. In dealing with people who disappoint us, I think this is a perfectly justifiable attitude.  But these are only plants, after all. And so I let them linger on, spoiling the look of the garden, until they inevitably die, which can take a long time.





This is a purple Hebe, just planted in late October 2008.



Here is the same plant, from a different angle, in September 2011.  See the 3 years' growth?  Me neither. Off with its head. It shall not be here in next Spring's photographs.



Bad Garden Habit #2: buying plants that just won’t grow for me, in the hope that this time, they will.

My special weakness in this area is Hydrangeas. I’ve tried them in lots of places; I’ve amended the soil, I’ve kept them watered, and yet they die, usually within a few months of planting. But still, when I see a spot with morning sun that needs a fairly large, summer flowering shrub to fill it, I immediately think: “Hydrangea.”  And at least once a year, I succumb and buy one. Why do I do this to myself? Why can’t I just leave them alone? Maybe it’s the challenge. Maybe it's pride. After all, lots of other people can grow them.



The only one I can grow is the Oakleaf Hydrangea, and it's only a modified success.

Bad Garden Habit #3: buying plants before I have the spot prepared to put them in, meaning they stay in their pots for a while after I bring them home. 

It happens because buying plants is a lot more fun than weeding and digging. But it isn’t good for the plants, especially if I forget to water them, which sadly has been known to happen.  Sometimes I do things the right way round and restrain myself, but not always.  As I type this, there are five plants sitting in pots outside my back door.  They’ve been there for a week.  I know where I’m going to plant them, I knew before I bought them, yet there they sit, because the site isn’t prepared for them yet. Even if I remember to keep watering them, they will become more root bound and their growth will probably be set back even after they are planted out.  I know this, so why did I do it?  Again?

This is the planting site, around the new stump.

Here then are three garden lessons hopefully now learned:

#1  If a plant has been in the garden for a year and it isn’t growing strongly, I'll harden my heart and get rid of it.

#2  I will accept that there are plants that won’t ever grow well in my garden, and stop buying them.  I will instead be content with the plants that love me back.

#3  I will prepare the planting site before I buy the plants.  And then I will plant them out straight away.

Or write another blog post about it.

The Light Fantastic

Over the last few weeks, I've really been noticing how light affects the look of the plants in the garden.  The angle of the light, its strength, its colour and its direction - these play a big part in making a plant noticeable and making it worthy of that notice.

One example is the bottlebrush. The flowers of the one below (Callistemon citrinus "Western Glory") were spectacular, drawing the eye for weeks, but they are over now. The plant will soon retreat into obscurity, just a rather dull green for most of the season, but not quite yet.  The new leaf growth coming from the ends of the brushes is lit up twice a day as the low morning and afternoon light shines through it.

Western Glory, indeed.

Or, to take another example:
On a dull day, Artemisia "Powis Castle" is a lacy, grey dome, very pretty.

But when the sun breaks through the cloud cover, it transforms into a shimmering mound of silver and green that makes it look like a completely different plant. The photograph above and the one below were taken only minutes apart. Truly.

One plant that I placed deliberately to allow its foliage to be backlit by the afternoon sun is the Smoke Bush (Cotinus coggygria "Velvet Cloak"). It is in what I have now grandly named the Sunset Border. It is a section where I have used red, orange, yellow and purple as the main colours.

The Cotinus is lit up, according to plan, but can you see the real star, in the spotlight? It's a common montbretia (Crocosmia x crocosmiiflora) grown for its orange flowers, which will appear later, but look how the leaves are glowing an almost unearthly lime green.

The Cotinus is looking good too,especially on the foliage that is higher up.

The Cotinus is cut right to the ground every winter to keep it compact and encourage larger leaves, so right now it is still well below fence height.  But in another month it will be above the fence and an incredible sight on sunny afternoons.

Here are the same plants on the same day, but in the morning, with the sun in front instead of behind.  The only difference is the light.

These plants look a bit dull but in the right situation, frontlighting can be exciting, because it creates shadows. Below is the best plant shadow in my garden. It's cast by a Tree Fern  (Cyathea australis) in the early morning.

As a gardening partner, light is fantastic.

Pretty Penstemons

After all the rain we’ve been having, some of my flowering plants are looking a little battered, but not the Penstemons, which are flowering beautifully.

Penstemons are one perennial that seems to reward me more each year. They form spreading clumps of green leafy stalks topped with long spikes of nodding, bell-shaped flowers in shades from white through pink, mauve and purple to red. Some flowers are single-coloured, but many have markings of a second colour. And if I cut down each flowering stalk once the flowers have faded, to about 10cm above the ground, the plant will keep sending up more, right through summer and just into autumn.

Penstemons prefer full sun and don’t mind dryness, although they will flower better with some water. Mine are thickly mulched and not watered much in summer. 

Some Penstemons tend to flop around a bit from the weight of the flowers, and you can stake them with thin sticks but I don’t like the look of this and really, I can’t be bothered. Instead, I cut them back by about half in early spring before they have started sending up flowering stalks, which makes the plants shorter, thicker and stronger and only delays flowering a little bit.

Even with this treatment, I have a very dark burgundy one that still flops, so it is planted behind an Artemisia “Powis Castle” and the stalks grow through and over this, which gives them some support.  The burgundy flowers also contrast well against the silver Artemisia. This one is looking innocent, but is just about to start flopping.  I can tell.

There are lots of named varieties; these are just a few I've grown: “Alice Hindley” is tall, at least a metre, and doesn’t need any support.  The flowers are wide, mainly purple, with mauve and white markings inside. It makes big clumps quickly and is very visible from a distance.  “Apple Blossom” is white flushed with pink, and a bit shorter but also doesn’t flop.  “Firebird” is a wonderful bright clear red but the stems, leaves and flowers are all quite thin and it is a flopper. I still grow it because I love it and it flowers longer than any others I have.

Here it is among lots of other flowers, just shyly peeping out.

And here's a better view. Isn't it lovely?

“Snowstorm” is a very good, pure white and quite sturdy. My floppy burgundy one is called “Blackbird”, by the way, and it does have the advantage that if you let some stems flop all over the ground, they will take root and make new plants for you. Other floppy Penstemons will do this, too.

Once they have really stopped flowering, usually in autumn, I cut Penstemons down to about 30cm above the ground and mulch them to protect the roots from winter frosts. They’ll survive here without this, but it seems to keep the plants more vigorous. You can divide the clumps in winter or early spring to make more plants or if they are getting a bit congested.

Penstemons don’t really like being disturbed, though, so whether I'm dividing an existing plant or planting out from a nursery pot, I've found it's best not to  tease out the root ball, but just try to move the plant gently into its new home, keeping as much soil around the roots as I can. And I buy them as small plants if I have a choice. They're cheaper and they settle in faster.

Shorter Penstemons look good as a groundcover under roses, and all kinds mix well into flower borders or as bright spots among shrubs. They don’t do well under trees as they won’t get enough light, and I have never seen them in pots so I don’t know if they are suited to being grown this way.  I think their roots probably need more room to spread out.

I don’t know why I haven’t seen many Penstemons around my area. They’re an old-fashioned plant, I suppose, popular in cottage gardens, but none the worse for that. They come in colours to suit any garden scheme, they don’t need pampering and they don’t seem to have any pests or diseases. Even snails don’t bother them much, although they will live in the clumps. I wouldn’t be without my Penstemons; in fact I might just have to get a few more.