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I remember standing in my parents’ kitchen several years ago listening to my mother complain about the trees in the back yard, how the branches had all grown back, how shaded the area had become, how poorly the sun-loving perennials she’d planted were doing. All this by way of discussing, yet again, the apparently never-ending argument she and Dad were having about pruning the trees on their woodland property. “Wouldn’t you think after all this time,” she was saying, “he’d just take care of it?” She meant, of course, wouldn’t he just give in and give her the bright, sunny space she wanted? No, actually, I wouldn’t have thought that; Dad liked the trees and didn’t give a damn about the flowers. I managed a certain amount of diplomacy in my answer, I think, but I really wanted to say, “What are you, nuts?”
Expecting my father to change was as crazy as expecting my mother to change, but that pales in comparison to the kind of crazy you have to be to expect nature to change. If you build a house in the woods, it doesn’t matter how many trees you remove, you have a house in the woods. You do not have, and you will not have, sunny meadows full of flowers, because nature will work overtime to fill that space with the things that were there before you. All you have to do to see the advantage that Nature has over you is to take a look at a pine cone and count the seeds, then take a look at the number of pine cones on a tree. Think you and your little pruning saw are any match? Think again.
While you’re thinking, take a look at the little propellers the surround a maple seed. They’re designed to carry that seed far enough away from the parent tree that the sapling will get all the sun and nutrient it needs to survive, and oak trees are so clever they get squirrels to do the work for them. As clever as we are, and with all the tools at our disposal, we are simply outgunned. Nature has a bigger arsenal, and all the time in the world.
It’s easier to find the right environment — for a plant or a person — than to continually manipulate a wrong environment in an attempt to get it to behave according to your desire. My favorite example of this happened a few years ago and involves a couple of peegee hydrangea, an extraordinary oceanside property, and people with way too much money.
The hydrangea had been planted in partial shade, which is okay everywhere except waterfront property. On waterfront property things planted in the shade never completely dry out, and things that don’t dry out are the ideal breeding ground for mold. When I saw these poor little trees I realized that fully half of the branches — the half that were in the deepest shade — had blossoms that were absolutely black with mildew. The other half — the ones that received a bit more sun — were lovely. The damp ocean breeze enveloped the entire tree, of course, but the sunnier side was able to dry out before the mildew could take hold.
Now most of us would say, Oh, I get it, I need to plant something else there, and put the peegees in anoher spot. That was exactly my advice. Did the owners take my advice? No. They hired a guy with a tree spade — a nifty, but very expensive bit of machinery — to dig up the trees and turn them around. Yes, you heard correctly; they rotated the hydrangea 180º and stuck them right back in the ground. That, by the way, is the too much money part.
Nature doesn’t care how much money — or time, or energy — you throw at something; she’s going to do what she’s going to do. Our best hope as gardeners is to read a site correctly, and to plant accordingly. Our best hope as humans is to do the same. If you’re happiest in full sun surrounded by lots of open space, or if you want to grow the things that are, plant yourself in that environment. If you want to be cozy, or cool and quiet, wrap yourself in a cocoon of trees and grow woodland things. Attempting to change the nature of Nature is a project even Sisyphus would reject.
Just like you need to read the fine print before you sign on the dotted line, you need to carefully read the information that’s given on a plant tag before you put your money down. The tags are telling you what you need to know, but not necessarily in the most direct manner. Here are a few of my favorite bits of nursery speak, translated:
Tolerates shade: in other words, if everything else in its universe is perfect, this plant will put up with the injustice of insufficient sunlight. Last time I checked, attempting to keep everything in the universe perfect will make you crazy and, if you’re like me, the load of things that already make you crazy would stop an elephant, so leave this plant alone. Find one that likes the environment you are providing.
Vigorous once established: in other words, in three or four years, if all goes well, the plant will begin to take off. Until then it requires as much tending as if it were brand new, and a little bit of luck besides. This is why new wisteria vines, for example, look so pathetic and the old ones are show-stoppers. If you’re not going to live in the house long enough to make that kind of commitment, or if you need something that’s going to be dazzling in short order, put the pot down and move along. Nurseries also use that phrase ‘once established’ in conjunction with ‘drought-tolerant,’ so read carefully. Decide before you buy if you’re willing and able to lug five or ten gallons of water to it every couple of days in the middle of next summer’s heat wave. Why do I say lug water? Because inevitably we put those trees far away from house and hose. Why do we put them far away? Because the tag says they’re drought tolerant. And so it goes…
Tree form: in other words, not an actual tree, but a shrub or vine that has been trained into the shape of a tree. Don’t get me wrong, I love them and use them — the classics like hydrangea and wisteria, along with tree-form rhodies and viburnum — principally because they add dimension to the garden and present their blossoms at eye level. The drawback is their tendency to revert to form — wisteria will begin sprouting new vines from the root almost immediately — and to maintain the tree shape for any of these, you need to continually remove any growth that occurs below the level at which you want the branching to happen. They require a bit more work, and they often need bracing to maintain their upright habit, but if you’ve ever drooled over an eighty-year-old wisteria ‘tree’ you understand the draw, as well as the drawback. With a little extra care, you and your tree-form should be very happy together.
N.B. Want to hear this as you wander through the nursery? Download the podcast and take me with you!
I got an email from a client yesterday asking if she should deadhead spent hydrangea blossoms, and since there seems to be fairly widespread confusion about what to remove when, here’s the five-minute drill on deadheading.
Let me start by saying that, while deadheading is a form of pruning, I’m not talking here about removing tree limbs, or thinning out an overgrown quince or rejuvenating an old lilac. Deadheading refers just to the removal of spent flowers from a plant, an ornamental shrub or tree. I’ll tackle the grittier aspects of pruning in another format, but I will say here that if any of your shrubs or trees suffers from one or more of the three D’s, you should tackle it immediately. What are the three D’s? Dead, diseased or damaged. If you’re not comfortable enough with your own skill level to handle the problem, ask for help. If you even suspect the plant’s in trouble, don’t wait.
That said, let me give you the same answer I gave Andrea about deadheading her hydrangea. She’s got three varieties, but this applies to all the so-called mophead hydrangeas like Nikko and Endless Summer and Annabelle: for a summer-flowering shrub, it really doesn’t matter. If it’s early in the season and a blossom has gone by, by all means remove it. Later in the season, and throughout the Fall, some people like to leave them on and watch them caramelize, and some don’t. With the PeeGees and the Tardivas and the Limelights, the whole point is to watch them turn that fabulous copper color, so don’t whack those before you enjoy the show, but for the others, it’s really your choice.
With the spring-flowering shrubs, it’s a little more complicated, but far from complex. My preferred technique is to cut the blossoms while they’re in bloom, and to use them the same way I use all the other cut flowers. I do that because the first word of flowering shrub is ‘flower,’ and it seems to me like damn fool nonsense, as my father would have said, not to enjoy them. The other reason is that I’m going to have to dead-head the thing eventually, anyway, and it’s more enjoyable to me to gather sheaves of flowers than to dead-head a shrub. I grant you, I often get into the zone where dead-heading becomes a meditation of sorts, but for the most part, I’d rather gather.
The chief reason to dead-head Spring-flowering shrubs is not cosmetic, it’s to ensure that the plant puts all of its energy into setting itself up for the next year. Removing the spent bloom tells the plant “Okay, show’s over; move on.” You can do this by hand or with shears, depending on the plant. For example, I take my shears to lilac, but use thumb and forefinger on the rhodies. This takes a bit of practice because the old flower is nestled between the new shoots and you may wind up taking more than you intend, but you’ve got a couple of hundred chances to get it right, so keep at it.
There is one codicil to this: dead-heading should never be done to any plant that sets fruit or berries, because those lovely little fertilized clusters will become the things you want either to eat or to admire. There’s also a half-codicil, I suppose, in that any shrub that sets inconsequential blooms — red osier dogwood comes to mind — will have inconsequential spent blooms, and since removing them won’t make next year’s blossoms of any greater significance, don’t bother. You, too, should move on, and spend your energy where it will do the most good.
There are lots of perennials I do let go to seed, just for fun, and although I remove the spent flowers of Siberian iris, I think the seed pods have a certain drama that carries the plant through the remainder of the season. This year I’m allowing the seed pods of some yellow Bearded iris to ripen, but since the seeds of a hybrid plant often revert to the parent stock, I’m not at all certain what they will produce. If it’s anything fabulous, I’ll let you know. For the most part, though, when the show’s over, I lop off their heads, and for certain plants, whack them back entirely. If it’s early enough in the season, they may do an encore. It’s seldom as vibrant as the first, but it’s something, although I have to say that the chives I whacked at the end of June because they went by so fast, have come back with great speed and in full.
So there’s the skinny: gather ye rosebuds — and lilac and laurel — while ye may, and if you have forgotten to gather, gather up your gloves and your pruning shears and have at it. It’s good for your plants and good therapy, to boot. Trust me on this; the next time you’re upset, spend half an hour or so in the garden snipping off every dead little head you can find. You’ll be amazed how much better you feel!
I overheard a conversation in a local nursery last week between a woman who was trying to buy the ‘right color’ hydrangea, and the nursery attendant who was trying to explain that color (for the mopheads, anyway) is all about soil acidity. I watched them lob phrases back and forth for a couple of minutes, but when it became clear the customer just wasn’t getting it I put on my Master Gardener hat and stepped in.
In less than a minute I was ready to scream. She just buys things and sticks them in the ground, she said; if they grow, they grow. If they don’t, she rips them out and buys something else. Get a book, take a class, for the love of God, learn something! It was on the tip of my tongue, and I’m actually rather proud of myself — not to mention a bit surprised — that I managed not to say it. Part of my reaction stems from my very Yankee background — we hate wasting money — and part of it is that, to a gardener, wasting good plant material is just wrong, on any number of levels. If you can’t be bothered to learn anything at all about gardening, buy a plant for your neighbor and then go cut your share of the flowers.
In lieu of that, here’s the five-minute drill on soil. Soil is composed of sand, which is pulverized rock, and organic matter, which is all the stuff that was formerly living and all the biotic life that feeds on the stuff that was formerly living. It usually also contains some degree of clay, which is composed of fine particles of silicates and other minerals. Along the coast here in southern Maine, because the land was under water for millennia we have a great deal of clay. This is harder to correct than soil that’s too sandy because clay is so dense; getting into it, breaking it up and amending it with the organic matter that will support plant growth is a bear. It’s a task I happily consign to boys — preferably good-looking, shirtless ones — with toys, because brute force is required, and I don’t have the back for it. Even if I did, there’s still the good-looking, shirtless part, and why spoil the fun?
Structurally, good garden soil is friable, a word that should mean ‘capable of being fried,’ but actually means ‘easily crumbled.’ When you squeeze a handful, it should hold together for a few seconds before falling apart. If it doesn’t hold together at all, it probably has too much sand; if it holds together longer, it probably has too much clay. Usually, you can tell good soil with just your eyes and nose: if it’s blond or grey, it needs organic matter. If it’s a good color but lacks that great, earthy scent, it needs organic matter. That’s compost, peat, desiccated manure and, my favorite, earthworms. Liquid fertilizer is fine for spot shots, but you can’t beat amending the soil. It allows water to flow, it allows the roots to branch; that in turn allows the plant to be secure in the ground, and to take up water and nutrient. If you’ve got organic matter in the soil, the earthworms will happily create little tunnels that allow roots to flourish, and they will do something else. They’ll poop, which will fertilize the soil and help it recharge. There’s also, of course, my preferred technique of soil management, which is planting the things that like the soil that you have. That means lavender and other woody herbs in sandy soil, and things that like their feet wet in areas with a clay base. That’s either laziness or practicality, I’m not quite sure.
Soil acidity is a different thing altogether. There are plants that want to be in ’sweet’ soil, soil that registers on the ‘alkaline’ side of the ph scale; and there are plants that want to be in ’sour’ soil, which is precisely what it sounds like: soil that registers high in acid content. Though there are many plants that are content to be somewhere in the middle, the bulk of plants that are really happy here in Maine are acid-lovers, and that’s no surprise, because Nature is no dummy. This state rests on a ledge of granite, which is why the pine trees came, and flourished; between the granite and the pine, we have some of the most acidic soil going. There are ways to reduce that, to sweeten it somewhat and bring it closer to neutral, but trying to grow plants that only do well in sweet soil is an exercise, perhaps not in futility, but certainly in frustration. If you really want to grow something that is foreign to your area and has a very particular ph demand, try a large pot or a raised bed, someplace where you can control soil. Sticking it in the ground, a la the woman who incited this discussion, will result in an unhappy plant, and an unhappy you, and life is way too short for either.
So there you have it; if you need more than this, get a book, take a class, or stay tuned to this blog.
NB: Download the podcast for this, and take me with you on your ipod!
