Fall Blessings

A nice long autumn means that I got most of my I'll-do-it-in-the-fall tasks done! It also means that we had tomatoes until a week ago, broccoli yesterday and I cut the last of all the herbs this weekend and stuck them in jars of water so that we'll have fresh sage, thyme, oregano and rosemary for a while longer. Greg had a dehydrator in the basement which I have stubbornly refused to use, opting for paper bags of drying herbs and lavender which have lined the counters and deck all summer. But we used it Saturday and I even dried a few of the last rose petals. As it turns out a dehydrator is so great! Who knew it would be so different? Well, Greg did actually. The rose petals are brighter, as is the color on all the herbs and the house smelled wonderful. Satisfying.Fall is a good time to do garden shuffling, and despite my procrastination, the lingering fall weather gave me time to make a change I am so happy about. I had planted three pennisetum plants next to each other parallel to the street for a clump effect. But they grew larger than I expected and with the addition of some very big gaura, this northern berm was looking very crowded.So I left one and moved the other two in a diagonal line on top of the berm, and I am so happy! It wasn't hard, the root ball was not too big and the result is pleasing every time I drive away from home.Our Yaku Jima grasses on the south berm have grown also and with their beautiful color and seed heads that catch the sun, they add such interest for fall and the first snowstorms.I have grown to love the ornamental grasses and their changing look through spring and summer, but just when most plants have been cut or died down, these lovely creatures make me happy every day!They even come inside for a while - where the kitty thinks they're a chew toy.
Ornamental grasses are often low water, there are grasses native to just about everywhere, and they are so much more versatile than I could have imagined. Since I love the flowing, unstructured look in my front yard anyway, these plants have added color, texture and verticality for the whole intermountain growing season. Guess I'm always trying to peddle a little grass!

Secret Garden

I keep talking about my secret garden in little bits and pieces, so here is the story of what it is and how it came to be. Our house sits almost in the middle of our large lot. Because we wanted a side entry garage and we are on a corner, we had to face our house east, which meant several things. One, as Greg will claim, we have a half mile of park strip to plant, water and mow. We also have an extra big front yard because there is no driveway taking space, and an extra wide frontage to allow for the garage on the side. And the because of setback rules, our house sits kind of in the middle of the lot. At one point, our back fence is only about 30 feet from the structure, (although there is still plenty of backyard play space if anyone wants to play) so we have planted trees and built a big arbor with Wysteria to give us and our neighbors privacy.But this placement also meant that we have two large side yards. On the south side, by the driveway, we set the fence back several feet and planted trees and shrubs. We felt that our neighbors across the street would prefer a nicer view that a blank fence, and it also just looks prettier from the street as one drives by. And inside the south side fence is a great garden spot. It gets lots of sun and is not in direct view unless we want to show it off.

That left the north side. It is about 35 feet wide and even deeper, front to back. It is out of view from the backyard until one is almost at the small arbor, and is out of view of the street even though we installed a low fence, because the yard slopes up from front to back. After several visits to the USU teaching garden in Kaysville, I thought about copying their beautiful plan on a much smaller scale for my own garden. One day, about 15 months ago, Greg and I walked around the space, pulling tall weeds and talking about what might work. I drew a plan and within a week we had begun to shape berms around the outside and an island in the middle. The sprinkling system was begun and we were off.

I had found a couple of plants the fall before and had planted them kind of randomly, so they were incorporated into the design. Once we had carted many loads of topsoil and soil pep to make the shape of the basic garden, we did a lot of stewing over the path. The USU garden has a wonderful hard surface that is still quite natural looking - not quite dirt, not quite gravel. It wasn't something we could find, so we improvised with sand, and a very tiny gravel. We bought sand in bags and spread it around, and then we spent half the summer taking 4 or 5 big buckets to a rock quarry on every trip into town and buying small quantities of the gravel. Every time we went to the city, we bought a few buckets of rocks and spread them around. It's a pretty good solution and I do a little raking design about once a week.Then we began to plant. I had already planted all our ornamental grasses, and Greg had planted about 26 trees and many many shrubs and we had together planted perennials galore - so last summer and this past spring I could concentrate on perennials for the garden. By the last September our newley seeded back lawn was taking shape, and the view into the garden was looking pretty good too.Over the winter that miraculous event of roots establishing themselves and baby one gallon, or smaller, plants had grown to many times their size. It grew and filled in - there is still space to fill, but some of that can just be dividing and transplanting. By this year it has become just what I dreamed it would be. And how often does that happen?

When Greg asked me what I wanted in a back yard, I said that I wanted rooms for different purposes. There is planting and maturing yet to do, but our back yard now has a garden area where we are growing fruits and vegetables and herbs, a small lawn with a tree in middle just right for playing with dolls or reading in the shade, a deck and patio for eating and visiting, a larger lawn area for running, playing croquet or catch or lying in the sun. And then tucked away where you have to be interested to explore, is my not so secret garden. You won't cross over into a new world or escape time or meet new species. But kind of.

Fruits of Our Labor

I do love the time when toiling in the garden begins to bear fruit! In this case we have real and visual fruits and both are lovely. On the visual side we have these:
First sunflowersFirst mixed bouquetFirst lavenderFirst gypsophila, but after being in the house for 4 weeks. I don't love baby's breath in floral design, but I do on its own!The later sunflowersThe eating variety of harvest:
First tomatofirst salsa fixings
First peaches - ever!First dinner (just the broccoli, tomatoes and lettuce - the chicken, I don't know where that came from. Magic maybe. The Dr. Pepper from heaven.)
First herbs all driedWe did not get our grow boxes built this year so we just use that space to bury gangsters. But we discovered that the south side of the house with its sun and warm stones is a great place for tomatoes and cucumbers and broccoli. And the squash is coming right along.It is such a satisfying time to see not only the beauty of the yard, but to feel it every day in house as well!

Families

Not that kind of family! But neat trick for uploading a picture of my children in a gardening blog, isn't it? I have become so interested in how connected plants are to each other, and the families to which otherwise apparently unconnected plants belong.
The most recurring in our yard and garden are in the Malvaceae or Mallow family, and the Hibiscus genus. We have a few species of this plant and some cultivars within those species. This year they have been and are now, especially beautiful - stemming to a degree from the rainy spring. In fact, most of our perennials are really big and wonderful this year.











First up were the hollyhocks. When the yard was new, lo these two years, I very much wanted hollyhocks. They do well in heat and don't need fabulous soil. And oh boy do we have a lot of not fabulous soil. They reminded me and everyone else in the west of my grandmother's house. But all I could find in nurseries were the new varieties, all of which were doubles. I am not a fan of doubles in most flowers - to me that breeding just makes everything look like a carnation. So I searched in vain for heirloom versions or common hollyhock/alcea rosea. Last year a neighbor who has beautiful hollyhocks offered to share some starts, so as she was thinning hers just a year ago she brought over several small plants of two or three baby stalks. They grew nice and bunchy over the summer and were quite healthy, but no stalks or blossoms. This year they have been spectacular! Since they are bi-annuals they are likely to come back only one time, but they spread and are also easy to plant from seed. Her heirloom plants are white, light pink, deeper pink and red. Mine are just finishing up now, and within a week I will cut down the remaining stalks, but I've had a good 2 months of blossoms!
Then there are the real hibiscus, hibiscus rosea sinensis. From Greg's former garden we transplanted two bright pink hibiscus, and have added a white one with a deep red center and several dark red versions. They are a wonderful plant for covering the house and adding interest to the front corners. The flowers each last one day, but when they call them dinner plate size - they mean it! There is a cultivar called hibiscus laevis, which has really beautiful leaves with a delicate pointed structure and the same flowers as rosa. Our bright pink hibiscus and this not-yet-opened red one are of the laevis variety.The blossoms will curl up and drop off eventually, but I'm a chronic deadheader and Greg says I get more blossoms on this plant that he ever did. They bloom into the fall, taking over about when the hollyhocks are done.And finally - for us at least, the hibiscus genus has hundreds of species - is the rose of Sharon, hybiscus syriacus. In my secret garden I have a rose of Sharon shrub that is one my few blue flowers. It will get very large, which means that this fall I will move the helianthus Maximilian next to it to a new spot. The flowers are beautiful and it is easy to see the family connection of these plants. I also wanted a rose of Sharon tree, which turns out not to be a cultivar, but just a shrub pruned through its life to act like a tree. This one was all we could find for a while and it is big and healthy, but the flowers are doubles. We later found this smaller one with traditional blossoms which I prefer.
I always like to discover family resemblances in people. Sometimes it's an actual facial structure, sometimes a personality and often just a little something that lets one know that certain people are related. As my children followed one another through school they were often asked if they were related to a preceding sibling. See? I love that this family of plant starts in the spring and carries through fall with blossoms that I find extraordinarily beautiful. Each one may only last a day, but they produce them in proliferation and can be dramatically exciting every time. Like children.

The Stake Center

There are many plants at which I turned up my nose because they have a tendency to droop or just fall over. Some that come to mind are phlox, coreopsis, dahlias, and even hibiscus, which I adore for late summer and fall color but which also fall like crazy as they get bigger. I avoided many of them, even threatening to take out the lovely smelling phlox because they were always lying on the ground (and they also tend to get a fungus easily so I was not friendly about them).

Then a couple of years ago I found some great plant stakes at a nursery ( they are at every home improvement store too) and since I love my hibiscus so much I thought I could use them for that. I did and they seemed to love standing tall instead of having to branch up toward the sun after lying on the ground when they had become heavy and tipped over. And it wasn't hard to do. So I kept buying the stakes when I was in the store and over three summers, I seem to have lost my fear. In fact, since we have largely passed the planning, heavy lifting and planting stage of creating a yard, I am finding that the fine tuning and even the everyday maintenance is quite satisfying - even creative.

Greg and I often take a walk through the yard in the evening, talking about the day and uprooting some of the hundreds of weeds that appear over night. I deadhead various blossoming perennials and he finds satisfaction in hand watering. And this year I have become quite the staker. I am enjoying hollyhocks long past the bad winds that knocked many of them over, because mine are staked! The phlox are not lying in the dirt and have gotten less moldy thanks to the loving arms that hold them up. And the big coreopsis look as if they they have nice strong stems - instead of the weak spindly things they really have. I don't need perfection in a garden at all - a little messy is just fine with me. But I have come to really appreciate the bonus of healthier, longer lasting plants thanks to a bit of routine attention. It feels like gardening rather than yard work!

Death in the Garden

No one has actually died in my garden, but in the early weeks of spring I inflicted a near death experience on my beloved secret garden plants, and I continue to grieve. If I can save the life of but one perennial, perhaps my pain will have meaning. Okay, so that may be melodramatic, but I have truly been distraught over this episode in my gardening life. It all began so innocently...

Greg, my gardening mentor brought home some fertilizer -high nitrogen- to give all our beds a boost. We have such terrible clay soil and in spite of our amendments it is too recently planted to have built up its own healthier topsoil. Of course nitrogen needs to be applied into the ground when it's fairly cool, raked in, and then watered thoroughly. And, in the case of perennials, should be applied only before the plants really grow much (one of my favorite nursery helpers says in fact, just compost a perennial garden in the fall and it will do great without additives. He thinks we make addicts of our gardens and I'm coming around to that).

So, on a day that was already too hot, and which got hotter than expected, I took some of said fertilizer and carefully placed it around the base of many plants. Then I became impatient, and began to just sort of toss it by handfuls. Finally, I was dropping it in the middle of some that were already about 18 inches tall - with the idea that I would come back, water it off the leaves and rake it in. But I didn't. I knew that the sprinklers in my secret garden were set to come on that night, so I did not worry too much. But they didn't. In fact, through a series of mistakes and misunderstandings, they weren't watered for a few days, and thus the tragedy had begun.

I went out a few days later and the biggest of the secret garden plants were just awful looking. Whole stalks of bee balm and meadow sage were black and falling over, clumps of little bluestem grasses had turned brown and died, the Jacob's ladder and lupine were all dead as were others of the new perennials. I went sobbing to Greg that all was lost, my garden was dead and this year was gone - along with other dramatic prophecies. He was appropriately sympathetic, politely ignoring my accusations that it was all his fault for going to the store in the first place. He suggested maybe raking in the remaining fertilizer still lurking about and watering thoroughly, which I did. Well, we did because it wasn't just in my garden that the mayhem occured.

Within a few days it was worse. Really!?, I thought. But as it turns out it's actually true that a weak and damaged thing in nature often attracts other things that finish it off - thus preserving the quality of the species. So in came the bugs, - earwigs, white flies and other odd looking creatures took over from the burning fertilizer. More tears and predictions of garden failure for 2009. I am not much of a pesticide person, but I immediately went on a search for the least damaging - but effective - bug killer I could find. The earwigs were happily munching each stem's roots right at the ground and they weren't one bit afraid when I dug around to scare them off. I powdered, I sprayed, I picked and squashed, still without much hope for the summer.

Two things happened which made all the difference. One is time. Apparently time does indeed heal at least most wounds. Water and time helped to stop the damage and allow other plants to grow up and hide much of the remaining scars. And also, because I tried very hard to design the garden to bloom all summer, along came crocosmia and phlox and hollyhocks and red hot pokers and more. The perennial geraniums and verbena which looked so sad at the start, pretty much replaced themselves and are now hale and hardy.

The lesson is, well there are too many to count. But the best one is that while nature may be brutal (and I after all, started the war myself) it also really really wants to keep itself growing and producing. I was almost too sad to work in the garden, busying myself with the rest of the yard, and then one day I found that it had been magically restored. I went out and it looked like this where it had been droopy and hammered:

I took heart from the growth and kept working and more magic later, it has come to this. And I know that as the hibiscus and lobelia and rose of Sharon and others begin to bloom, it will just get better. Apparently gardening takes patience, faith and trying trying again, along with the hard work and experience. Lemonade anyone?

Details

In a garden, or more generically, a yard, there are many ways for the landscape to take form. Years ago a family often moved in to a new home, planted a front and back yard full of some soft green grass and then gradually they may have added some beds and trees. It was likely that the dad of the household dug the sprinkling system trenches and that he either seeded the lawn himself, or was a bit extravagant and brought in sod. However, when I was very young in the suburban southwest, sod was was quite unheard of.

Time changes in all things and landscape design is no exception. Sod farms made it possible to have a lawn in a day, a plethora of landscape companies mean the there can be lawn, curbing, planted beds and several trees with a fully functioning sprinkler system in a couple of weeks. At the other end of the spectrum are homeowners like us who study and design, dig and haul and generally enjoy the process every bit as much as the result. Most fall somewhere the middle. My sister and her husband bought a new house and had a wonderful design done by a landscape architect and have then been chipping away at planting what he recommended each year. Across the street a new neighbor had his yard installed, and has been planting flowers and shrubs of his own choice to finish it off.

However the yard comes together, the real stamp of individuality comes in the details. Small features that we may install to make things work better for us, little plants in out of the way places that are treasures awaiting discovery,
or rocks and accessories which have meaning, make a yard unique and personal. Some of ours are:

Our red stones in the yard and path that came from my parents' wonderful St. George home. My Dad split them for his own path and let us have the excess. The path is great and I think of years enjoying the beauty of their desert home every time I use it.


The dry river bed that goes from one end of the front to the other. A big truck dropped about 13,000 pounds of rocks on our dirt and in a couple of weeks we placed them one at time in the bed. Each side has a way to cross, a little stone bridge on the south and in the north section, a stone in the middle to easily step across to the other side.

The little moss and thymes that grow between paths and hose bib rocks
here and there.




















And for some reason, I really love the two gravel beds that Greg made for a couple of spots where the roof drips. They look quite nice, and they prevent the kind of holes that usually happen with dripping eaves in a storm.

















Greg is tall and he built some benches years ago to make simple carpentry tasks easier by putting them at his arm level. I painted this one with our trim paint for our small front porch. Without being too bulky for the spot, it is still a touch of personality and occasionally, a place to sit.
Any unique and personal touch - furniture, art, specimen plants or unusual arrangements, add the detail to a landscape that make it remarkable. These touches also say that attention was paid to this spot and invite a visitor to do the same.