Lost in the Garden Zone

December 7, 2009 at 6:19 pm · Filed under Stories from the Garden ·Tagged Autumn Joy, cottage garden, Delphinium., garden writing, Hydrangea, New England garden, perennials, Russian Sage

I’ve been planting my cottage garden for about 4 years, which includes a number of smallish plots around my house in New England, near Boston.

I like getting lost in what I call the garden “zone.” It usually starts out innocently enough as I sit with my morning coffee on the front steps. Mmm…doesn’t the sun look great spilling over the garden, the yellow Daffodils are nodding next to the cobalt blue Scilla of early spring. On a light breeze, I can smell the familiar scent of lilac. I congratulate myself, once again, for having planted it so close to porch. The yellow and purplish Pansies in the window box look like great floppy hats.

All this before the grand display of June and July, full of various roses, the stunning grace of Peonies with Iris, the delicate blue and white Bell Flowers, and so on. I also enjoy the waning colors of fall, the subdued ruddy browns, burnt oranges, and reds. My Hydrangea, now darker pink, is tangled nicely with the purple Russian Sage. No matter the season (except the dreaded winter of course), it always starts the same way.

“I’ll just snip off that brown stem,” I say to myself. Clippers in hand, I wander happily, nothing like a session in the garden to sort out the problems of the world and clear your mind. Except that hours later I can still be found puttering around, by now the sun is blazing. I bought a wide-brimmed cotton hat just for that purpose and I try to remember to put it on.

I’ve also discovered that gardening is not for the faint of heart. Forget that picture-book image of long ago, the one with the frail maiden and the dainty basket of cut flowers. Gardening turns out to be a good workout. Lugging mulch and top soil around does wonders for the muscle tone. In the 3^rd year, I dug a hole deep enough to fall into. It wasn’t until then that I realized why plants refused to grow in certain parts of my garden. I hadn’t gone down deep enough to find a number of leftover tree roots. I bought a saw, and sawed and sawed, until finally I wrested one out, landing backwards with a big thump. With a dirt-encrusted arm, I brandished an overgrown root. It looked like an enormous tooth from a root canal gone awry.

Five summers later, all my dirt digging, catalog browsing, and note scribbling, have paid off. This was the first year that I saw the successive colors I imagined. When I wrote this entry, the crisp fall air had yet to settle in and I was still in denial about summer being over.

Garden Reading Notes
To keep myself sane in the winter, I read anything about gardening I can get my hands on. I learned a lot from Color in Your Garden, by acclaimed Brit Penelope Hobhouse. It’s a big useful book organized by color with large photos and charts which clearly identify bloom time. By the way, you wouldn’t want to mess with Penelope, just by the stern look on her face and stiff tweed coat, you can tell that her advice is to be taken seriously.

Lisa G.

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