The Excess Lush-ness of the August Garden

 In horticulture, can there be too much of a good thing? I definitely think so.  My gardens this August are a case in point.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.”

Seeing the Garden... and All of its Weeds

Our doorbell rang last week for the first time since early March.  Peering out through a window, we saw an anxious-looking, casually attired middle-aged woman with face mask in place.  Curious, we opened the door.

“I’ve been biking past your garden for months,” the woman said.  “I finally worked up the courage to ask if we could see it.”  She motioned behind her to a similar-aged man standing next to a car parked out on the street.

This is how our garden appeared
from the street in July 2020

Betty and I looked at one another.  “Sure,” I said.  A few minutes later, we were all standing, masked and socially distanced, on our sidewalk.

The woman explained she and her husband had grown tired of their grass lawn and wanted to make an ecological statement.  Our garden was the closest thing they had seen to what they envisioned.  Flattery, I guess, will get you everywhere.  For the next hour, we walked the couple through our property and explained how, over five years, we created our native garden from what had been a thicket of pines and nasty, invasive plants and shrubs. 

One of our stands of Monarda - in July

The woman was enchanted by what she saw; her husband, somewhat less so.  He kept asking about wildflower blends that could be purchased, sown, and cause their lawn to turn into a colorful meadow.  Betty carefully explained that ‘gardens in a can’ don’t take into account the reality of differing rates of growth or the aggressiveness of certain plants.  “You really have to start with lots of pots,” she said; almost but not quite apologetically.

The same Monarda in late August
after six weeks of drought and heat

While Betty pointed out and enumerated specific trees, shrubs and perennials – the names of which were entered into the woman’s phone; I was making a different list.  Mine was of tasks we had let slide during the debilitating, six-week-long heat wave that seemed a fitting accompaniment to our Covid-19 year.  Our guests thought the garden looked wonderful.  All I could see was the neglect.  Spent perennials had not been trimmed back and weeds were everywhere.  Paths were barely passable because of overgrown plants, and summer-blooming perennials were obscured by rangy shrubs.

I know Betty was seeing the same to-do list because, as soon as our guests left, she pointed out everything I had noticed, plus a few more problem areas.

One of our foundation plantings. To us
it looked terrible (oxalis highlighted).

Which, I guess, is the key difference between those who are visiting gardens and those who maintain them.  It’s a forest-and-trees thing: the visitor sees a pleasing green fuzzy ground cover with cute, tiny yellow flowers.  The gardener sees opportunistic and unwanted oxalis encroaching into every open space.  A dozen arching but clearly spent liatris can be viewed as a graceful, visual destination point; or they can be recognized as the husks of once-attractive perennials waiting to dump tens of thousands of seeds that will mean pulling out the same number of seedlings from every corner of the garden next spring.

The same area, after an hour's
work this morning

With the arrival of cooler temperatures, we’ve spent the first two-plus hours after dawn each morning bringing the garden back into some semblance of order.  As I fill buckets with the detritus of that cleaning, though, I’m also trying to keep in mind the genuine sense of appreciation those visitors had for what we’ve accomplished.  All too frequently, we dwell on the warts: all the things we’ve not done (and whether it’s a good trait or a personality flaw is a subject for another discussion).  

The spent liatris: a 'visual destin-
ation point' or a disaster
unless cut down immediately?

I strongly believe we need to leaven that ingrained dissatisfaction with a dollop of reality: real gardening is hard.  Whether it’s a small vegetable garden in the back yard or a manicured estate, creating something takes time and patience, and maintaining it requires a commitment measured in seasons rather than hours.

My back ached after pulling multiple buckets of weeds this morning, and the well-earned shower afterwards felt wonderful.  The best feeling of all, though, was looking past the newly cleaned areas to admire the half of the garden that still requires attention, and thinking to myself with a grin, ‘I had a hand in making all of that happen.’