Don't Look a Gift Horse...

Times are tough all over: public or private, gardeners tend to tighten their belts and set aside grandious plans for follies, blue slate patios and three tiered fountains. I was reminded of this general resourcefulness in a conversation last week with one gardener from down near Lenexa. We first sold plants to this children's garden last year, a typically challenging year one experience with cancelled orders, unanswered phone calls and various other misunderstandings. When the bid came over the email transom earlier this winter, there was serious discussion about how we should respond. But, we hate to leave any greenhouse space unfilled and we've been doing this long enough to realize the second year is always an improvement as grower and gardener get better acquainted. In this case, the gardeners are bound and determined to carpet the ground with flowers, even as the orders for individual, designer, high dollar cutting raised plants are pared down. Not to worry! Back to the drawing board, or in this case, the proverbial egg before the chicken: the humble seed.

Lisa is serious about the Children's Garden. Last year she told me she covered her driveway with drying seed heads of assorted annuals, even though she was pretty certain her neighbors didn't appreciated the blowing debris. When I heard that, I was convinced her seed saving mania was frugality in the interest of greater beauty and gladly delved into memory to come up with candidates for flowers with the biggest bang for the least buck.

Cheap posies come in multiple guises. I covered one of those bases by ordering several thousand seeds of some of the most beloved of cutting garden favorites. In wholesale quantities, a generous swath of cosmos, whether feathery leaved Sonatas or neon bright Cosmics, will set one back not much more than a five spot. A packet of a thousand zinnia seeds of modern breeding are easy to lose in the car, but you'll never lose them in the garden! A scratch in the soil, a hoed row, a sprinkling before a shower, and you'll have the ineffable pleasure of discovering emerging seedlings and a devil may care attitude if the grandkids, family pet, or mower man take out a dozen or more in the normal course of summer events. That's one way to cover some territory.

But the fun really begins later. NEXT year, mother Nature takes over the garden design and the human gardener can decide how much of a control freak he or she desires to be.

I am a tardy gardener. For better or worse, the green things in my yardhave a running start on their supposed lord and master. In the big circle bed out front last year's coneflowers and balloonflowers are duking it out with aging clumps of daylilies and Autumn Joy sedum I planted to provide balance in the fall. The daffodils have proliferated to such an extent that one cannot fit a trowel between them. If I had it to do over again, I would go for a monoculture of daffodils somewhere in the yard, much as I enjoy their long season of cheerful bloom when I come home to an otherwise unkempt abode. I used to dream all winter of the perfect plant to ring the circle bed, but then the coneflowers filled in all but one quadrant, and now another helpful volunteer is stepping up to the brick edging the bed. This cuphea, a relation to 'Rumba' and 'Flamenco', exhibits all the vigor of its passionately named siblings, making up for small blooms with sheer plant volume and toughness. You can hoe out as many of these seedlings as you want, but you won't get them all, so its just easier to go with the flow. Around the pergola in the back yard, I have ceded one whole side of the border to the cupheas; they keep the weeds down; they are drought resistant; and they can be mowed off where ever the mower man thinks they intrude.

Unlike the cupheas, which only come back where they have been planted, a verbena bonariensis will soon colonize every empty corner. Don't get me wrong, I love this plant; it weaves beautifully among other stemmy bloomers, whether annual or perennial. The mauve, or violet, or aubergine, hue, take your pick, blends with every color, hot or cool, and clashes with none. The plant stands and is hardy well past an initial frost. I would happily recommend verbena bonariensis to anyone, except for that whole rather frightening ability to carpet any bare ground. If you are vigilant and ruthless with your hand hoe early in the season, the seedlings that escape will provide a pleasant accent later in the summer when other annuals flag.

The giant back perennial border was designed with volunteers in mind. It is far from water and so deep and wide that I always planned it to be minimum maintenance. One massive weed flinging orgy in the early summer and one unpleasant itchy pruning in the fall is what it gets. In between, I cut out the elms and mulberries, mow close, and enjoy the opportunistic arrangement of the perennials from afar. There are hardy hibiscus for deep into the summer heat; miscanthus of various persuasions for catching autumn light; penstemons, echinaceas, and rudbeckias to approximate the prairie roadside; and purple poppy mallow and hydrangeas for shock value. I have terrible eyesight; my aim is to enjoy this bed from my bath on the second floor!

Speaking of rudbeckias: I have a weakness for them. A huge swath of the garden around the pond has been sacrificed to the volunteer rudbeckias. Most of them are the simple, black eyed Susie variety, but over the years, I've planted 'Prairie Sun' with its green gold eye, and 'Cherokee Sunset', a double with shades of bronze. Each year, a new variation of the black eyed Susan appears in the catalogs and every year I have to have a flat to introduce somewhere in the garden. Never mind that some years the caterpillars take them, or that they leave a spot barren of bloom in mid summer. For six weeks in June and July, they are the glory of the garden. Daisies forever!

Finally, in all my praise of volunteers, some caveats. Be vigilant if you fall in love with 'Little Bluestem'. Be wary of potentilla. Shun cattails in the water garden. Never cease to prune out 'Autumn Glory' clematis or trumpet vines. One, or at most two, volunteer asters is all that should be tolerated. Cleome will become a prickly thicket. And any petunia that comes up the second or third year will be a pale shadow of its ancestor. Weed it out!!

Being a gardener is hard enough; welcome the freebies Mother Nature dishes out. They've proven they can live in your world and you should reward some of that spirit and vigor. Use your artist's eye and your surgical hoe. And use all your extra time to make new gardens!!

Cleanin' Up

My mom always had problems with leftovers. We kids always took our lunches to school; my dad packed his lunch and thermos too, in his old metal box. Clearly, what she cooked would feed somewhere between four and seven, but not two full family meals. As a result, periodically my mom would find little plastic freezer squares with....hmmmm, something green and fuzzy inside. This was such a small blind spot that it got to be rather endearing; there was even a cartoon on our fridge for years about green things lurking in the fridge.

She also had cedar chests of fabric remnants. Often, these pieces of cotton kettlecloth would resurface as jumpers or skirts in our wardrobe, but the levels of colorful cloth in the chest or on her sewing table never seemed to shrink. There was just too much potential good in these pieces of the end of the bolt.

Blind spots shift from generation to generation. I have far too many clothes in my closet, but I am not a fashion hawk and don't send nearly as many well worn shirts or tees off to Good Will. My work clothes are more disreputable; the standard level of wear and tear and grime is high, but the dress code at my job has a low threshold for stains and tears and a threadbare tee still has its place as a transition between spring cover and summer ventilation. Blake's overalls head for the trash can when certain key seams fail, but not when the cuffs are frayed or the pliers pocket springs a leak from one too many screwdrivers.

The most obvious blind spot: the piles. Piles of newspapers at the foot of the couch. Piles of magazines on both ends of the kitchen island. Piles of paperbacks on the coffee table. Piles of paperbacks and travel books on the little kid's chair on my end of the couch. Piles on the big desk upstairs...these are undifferentiated agglomerations of newsprint, excerpts, research booklets, reprints from the internet. Any one of these could be vital. Some are passe'. But until the occasion arises, no one knows which is which.

The best recent cleaning event was the painting/carpet cleaning/ furniture moving/file cabinet acquisition project in the greenhouse office. By the end of the plant season, the office is an abysmal quagmire of mulch, potting mix, scraps of paper, tags, discarded clothing. On the Sundays I do payroll, it takes an hour of picking up before I can even stand to attempt to do office work (one of my admitted quirks). How satisfying it was to move even the old bed, ditch the stuff stashed under the bed, and paint over the stains and grime accumulated over the last two years. Rug doctors are wonderful appliances, but nothing beats new paint for a pick me up.

Alas, the big cleanups at Spruce lie ahead. The house plants are still living in the sun porch, happily because it has stayed cool and they had some heat this winter, but they will still shed mighty amounts of organic matter on their way down the stairs and out the door for their summer sojourn. Before I can begin potting the summer pots, I make myself move the house plants. We've lived here for nearly eight years now. Do you know what that means? Eight years is as long as a perennial garden can survive in a grassy environment without major rehab.

This week as I delved into the back yard for the first time this spring, I just about went back inside to crawl under the bed and stay. Despite days of hoeing last fall, the brome has completely eaten my daylily bed and the bed around the old lilac. DESPAIR!! My loving husband, in a moment of crystal clear perspicuity, offered to find some magic in a sprayer that would attempt to rescue the perennials from the ravaging monocots. I have to tell you that desperate times require desperate measures, and if the daylilies cannot be salvaged, I will take a Roundup jug to the whole mess. That's rather like burning the barn instead of scooping out the manure, but not really. My first garden at Deadman's was plagued with bindweed.

 Roundup would knock it down but by the end of the summer, the hideous white blooms would dominate. Only a good six years under black ground cloth killed it back...but for well less than six years! I know well that that a pasture in mid Missouri wants to become a forest, even though the transitional stage of cedars and brush is no more attractive than growing out a perm. But here on the prairie, every natural process points to grass and only 1) a prescribed burn, 2) Roundup, or 3) yearly tillage and a planting of annual flowers or vegetables prevents this natural transition from occurring.

So, darn. Before I can call my spring cleanup complete, I have to face the sea of grass in the perennial beds. Last weekend, it took me two hours to clean out the closets and bag the two piles: one for Goodwill, one for the trashman. But it will take at least one pair of garden gloves, innumerable sharpenings of the hand hoe, several tank mixes of Roundup and whatever other magic Blake has up his sleeve, AND digging up the enormous clumps of daylilies from their current home, to make spring cleaning of the garden a reality. When folks tell me they want to plant perennials so they don't have to plant every year, I don't climb on my step ladder and begin to preach.

If anyone should ask my opinion, I would tell them to eschew perennial gardens for mixed plantings with wide swaths of glorious colorful annuals. Like a firebreak, an annual garden provides a barrier to the invasion of the rhizome. I love daylilies; I love balloon flowers; I deeply adore coneflowers and rudbeckia. I am passionate about my July flowers.

But for cleaning purposes, give me a good sun coleus any day.