The El Niño summer that has
produced floods in West Virginia and tornados in the South has left New England
parched. Most of Massachusetts
officially passed into a Stage 2 drought this past week, and nearly every town
now have complete bans on lawn watering along with other water use
restrictions.
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| Our front garden as it appeared this morning, August 6 |
The reverberations are being
felt in local nurseries. If people fear
they won’t be able to water their gardens, they won’t buy plants. And nurseries face the same water scarcity:
retention ponds that allow them to keep their stock well irrigated are running
dry, and the alternative is expensive town water. The result is that everything is on sale:
trees, shrubs, and perennials that are out the door are plant that don’t have
to be watered.
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| The drought is getting worse |
Following a heavy spring
planting schedule, we had decided to use the summer to see how the new
additions to the garden filled in. But
then the offers began arriving. First, Cochato Nursery in Holbrook offered Master
Gardeners a one-day special discount.
Betty drive over and came back with six specimens of Betony (Stachys officinalis), a
full-sun-tolerant flowering ground cover which she promptly used to begin
filling in a previously unplanted part of our front garden.
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| Betony comes in many leaf colors, and makes a great ground cover |
The following week, we received
a mailer from Weston Nurseries
with an arresting offer of $25 off of $75 worth of plants, including ones
already on sale. Betty went off to
investigate and came back with a car filled with yellow Coreopsis and Shasta
daisies. They were all in magnificent
bloom and we planted them immediately.
While picking out plants, she spoke with one of Weston’s staffers who
was candid about the low levels of the retention ponds and the fallback
position of using expensive town water.
When Betty tried to give back the discount coupon at check-out, the
clerk gave it back to her saying, “We’d rather you came back in and use it
again.”
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| Avant Gardens' greenhouses overflowed with interesting plants |
This week, the discount offers
came from Avant Gardens in North
Dartmouth. I’ve written
about this specialty nursery before.
North Dartmouth is an hour from our home in a direction that makes it on
the way to nowhere else that we ever go.
But the lure of unusual plants at substantial savings drew us to a part
of the state where our mental maps say “Here Be Dragons”.
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| Caryopteris 'Hint of Gold' |
Betty’s avowed purpose in going
was to procure three specimens of Caryopteris
x ‘Hint of Gold’, a deer-resistant butterfly magnet with distinctive lime green
foliage and vivid blue late summer flowers.
But allowing me to tag along on any shopping expedition is an invitation
to blow the budget, and it took me about two minutes to start dragging out
Geranium ‘Rozanne’ which we need to extend the ‘river’ of that perennial that
we have created across the front of our property. Betty, too, started seeing plants that she had
on her wish list but had put off buying.
I capped it off by spotting a Cape Plumbago (Plumbago auriculata) ‘Imperial Blue’ with phlox-like flowers in an
ethereal shade of blue. I said I wanted
it for my birthday. We filled the back
end of our Prius with plants. So much
for three small plants.
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| I got a Cape Plumbago for my birthday |
We planted almost everything we
purchased at Avant Gardens this morning.
It took four hours in weather so warm and muggy that our clothes were
drenched when we finally called it quits.
We started early because the forecast today was for rain. In fact, Weather.com’s maps showed the entire
Northeast getting socked by thunderstorms and torrential precipitation. But it is going on 5 p.m. and the current
radar shows just a few showers, all north of us.
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| Our fizzled day of rain |
This summer of drought will
apparently linger well into August. And through serendipity, our garden is a
little – no, a lot – fuller than we had anticipated a few months ago. Which means we'll have to keep finding innovative ways to keep it watered.
