In horticulture, can there be too much of a good thing? I
definitely think so. My gardens this
August are a case in point.
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This month, everything in the garden is
lush, verdant, and overgrown |
Here in Massachusetts, we had an entire summer’s worth of rain
in July: more than twelve inches. Betty’s and my plot in the community
vegetable garden exploded with growth. Squash vines grew a foot in two days.
Tomatoes went from flowers to pickable fruit in record time. The zucchini – oh,
the zucchini – was and still is out of control. We are freezing a multi-serving
bag of green beans every day. We have Swiss chard with every meal – including
breakfast.
But it is our garden at home where the chickens of excess of
lush-ness have come home to roost. The Covid summer of 2020 came amid a
drought. Every day I carried jugs of water around the garden, doling out just enough
to keep both containers and perennials alive. By contrast, this summer each of
our four rain barrels is filled to capacity, and there are no takers for the 220
gallons they hold. There are days when the ground squishes.
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This beautyberry is engulfing our
delicate bog rosemary plants |
Everything on the property is undergoing a growth spurt. A
formerly well-behaved beautyberry (
Callicarpa) added several feet to its
girth and currently sports a six-foot diameter, smothering several of the
delicate bog rosemary plants (
Andromeda polifolia) that form a border
for our sidewalk. The same beautyberry has also encroached into the turf of our
native bush honeysuckle (
Diervilla lonicera), which is on a similar
growth tear.
Because both plants are
blooming prolifically and therefore swarming with happy bees, we can’t get near
them with our No. 2 Felcos to cut back either plant.
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Before being cut back or staked,
these liatris looped across the
pathway like track hurdles |
I spent four hours over the past two
mornings weeding perhaps 40 of our 200 feet of walkways through our front
garden. I tackled that job because the paths had become tripping hazards,
with long, looping stalks of
Liatris, top-heavy with blue flowers, arching
down into the aisles like track hurdles. Once past the
Liatris, would-be
walkers then encounter a stretch of seven-foot-high, water-swollen Joe-Pye Weed
(
Eupatorium maculatum) muscling in from either side of the walkway. Last
year, those same perennials were compact and topped out at four feet. This
year, they’ll be higher than our adjoining, six-year-old Eastern Redbud (
Cercis
canadensis) ‘Burgundy Hearts’.
That’s
not supposed to happen in the plant kingdom.
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A leucothoe 'Girard's Rainbow'
in desperate need of a trim |
While I tackled the walkways and
adjacent perennial beds, Betty went to work on the foundation plantings. The
area to the left side of our front porch has a rather elegant and colorful mix
of several
Leucothoe ‘Girard’s Rainbow’,
Rhododendron ‘Weston
Aglo’, mountain laurel (
Kalmia) ‘Sara’, and a
Hydrangea ‘Vienna’,
with a dense ground-cover planting of enough tiarellas, heucheras, and bleeding
heart (
Dicentra) to stock a medium-sized nursery.
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Under these prairie wine cups were our
ground covers - heuchera and tiarella |
Betty’s observation was the
Leucothoe,
sometimes called ‘dogs-hobble’ was living up to its nickname. Getting the three
shrubs back to something approaching their preferred size filled a 50-gallon
canvas barrel with cuttings, and she had still not tackled the rhodies or
mountain laurel.
In the meantime, Betty
discovered a woody vine with a pleasant, dark-pink flower (Prairie wine cups or
Callirhoe involucrata) had somehow insinuated itself in the middle of
the ground covers in front of the shrubs, and was in the process of taking over
the site.
Betty swears it wasn’t there
last year – or even last month – yet its tentacles had covered roughly a
hundred square feet of the aforementioned tiarellas, heucheras and dicentra. When
removed, the vine filled most of another 50-gallon barrel.
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| One of our as-yet un-weeded paths |
As of yesterday afternoon, our eight-hour
investment in the garden clean-up had yielded only some walkable paths and one
part of the foundation planting to show for our efforts.
In the meantime, we are compiling an
ever-lengthening mental list of Things That Need To Get Done.
Our dwarf black birch (
Betula nigra)
needs to be thinned. The now-past-bloom Shasta daisies – about 50 square feet
of them – need to have their flowers removed. The perennial ageratum (
Conoclinium
coelestinum) has strayed from its assigned area in the long perennial border
along the driveway and is stealthily establishing colonies in places where it
doesn’t belong.
Oh, and we accomplished all this
during the two ‘good’ days of this week; meaning the morning temperatures were
in the 70s and the dew point was merely ‘oppressive’.
Starting today, Mother Nature decided to play
one of her little tricks on us: thermometers are soaring into the 90s with
‘real-feel’ temperatures in triple digits. Our plan was to adjust our outdoor
work schedule to perhaps 90 minutes between pre-dawn and 7 a.m.
Which is, of course, also prime mosquito
feeding time. We would slather our bodies with DEET-based repellents (all the
while knowing we would still be attacked incessantly).
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| The driveway border is coming into its own |
Our outdoor foray this morning lasted
ten minutes. Then, we scrambled back inside and showered. The heat will break
this weekend.
We’ll take care of the
garden then.
Why, then, do we do it at all? In our case, it is to create a landscape that
just might nudge some of the dozens of people who walk by our property each day
into getting rid of part or all of their suburban lawns and replacing that
grass with native plants and shrubs. And, sure enough, just yesterday morning,
a walker spotted me on my kneeling pad, pulling out errant weeds and ambitious
seedlings.
“Love the garden,” the walker said,
giving me a thumbs up. “Is it a lot of
work?”
“Hardly break a sweat,” I replied,
lying through my smile. “These are
native plants. They practically take
care of themselves.”
