Zanthan Gardens
Category: Garden Essays

I’ve been mulling over a question posed by Stuart Robinson at Gardening For Dummies: what are my gardening goals?

I let the question simmer in my mind while I mowed the grass, pulled weeds, and dead-headed the flowers. Although I am a very goal-oriented person in most aspects of my life, when it comes to my garden, this question had me stymied.

I realized that I don’t have any goals for the garden, except the short term goal of surviving another summer in Austin. In fact, survival seems to be foremost in my mind whenever I do anything in the garden. It colors my plant choices, the times of year I buy and plant, and my decisions about having a vegetable garden this year, letting parts of the lawn die, or putting in new beds. The development of my garden is ruled by this one constraint: will it survive? If not, why bother?

A goal implies a finished product, an end-result. It’s probably obvious to anyone visiting my garden that I have no real plan. Conventional wisdom is that you can’t get anywhere if you don’t know where you’re going. In the garden, I’m going nowhere; I’m just meandering down the garden path. That’s fine by me. I’m more interested in process than end-results. Gardening is about the journey, not the destination.

For me garden is a verb rather than a noun. I garden to give myself space to think and because I enjoy observing the rhythm of the seasons. Gardening is a form of meditation. Few people visit my garden; it’s not a showplace or a place for entertaining or even a place to sit back and relax in. I find it impossible to si. a moment in the garden. In fact, the one place I have to sit is so little used that it has disintegrated and been overgrown with flowers.

Rose dieback is not a disease, I’ve read, but it sure acts like one. The canes begin turning brown and dying back. At first, it’s difficult to tell whether or not the rose just needs a little more water and extra loving care. Then, more and more canes die back and the rose is dead.

Your supposed to be able to squelch the spread of the dieback by pruning the cane low where it is still green. If you look at the the place you cut, there should be no brown center. Howeever, with ‘Ducher’ and major cane had died and I couldn’t cut it out without cutting the bush in half. No matter. The whole thing is dead now, to my regret. I always thought of ‘Ducher as my New Year’s rose as, here in Austin, it seemed to bloom best in the winter. I don’t know if that’s because it preferred temperatures in the 50s, or it was just relieved to be out of the shade of the pecan. I loved its lemony scent, its very reddish new growth, and that it formed a neat, dense shrub.

I lost “Caldwell Pink” to dieback last year about this same time.

I’ve always thought I was good pruner, but the primary cause of rose dieback is poor pruning–pruning too far above a node. Given that ‘Ducher’ was very dense and twiggy, she was difficult to prune. So I guess it’s my fault. Darn!

I’ve always thought that one weakness of a lot of science fiction is that the imagination of writers and movie makers just can’t compete with the variety of plants and landscapes we encounter right here on planet Earth.

A May day in England left me literally speechless; I didn’t have the words to describe what I saw all around me. I pressed the natives to translate.

“What’s that bush we saw on the way in from the airport–covered with golden yellow flowers?”
“What? The gorse bush?” (Update: considered an invasive weed in North America, gorse is dangerously inflammable. Planting gorse in drought-stricken Texas would be a bad idea.)

“Wow! Those azaleas look like they’re on steroids.”
“Oh. You mean the rhododendron?”

Even my transplanted husband, who swears he can’t remember the crape myrtle in our own backyard, seemed to be an expert on his native flora. As we drove from Cheshire to Gloucestershire the untrimmed hedgerows were covered in white flowers, looking like monster sprays of spiraea. Remembering my own sad spiraea, I was impressed. “No.” AJM corrected. “That’s hawthorn.” (Update: Both are members of the rose family, so perhaps my confusion isn’t completely laughable.) He also knew cow parsley (Anthriscus sylvestris) which looks like a giant cousin of our hedge parsley (Torilis arvensis) I wondered if it shares the same nasty seeds that stick to your socks when you walk through it. Although we Texans consider hedge parsley to be a rank week, in the UK it has its own Biodiversity Action Plan. Take mine! Please.

I was amazed by the huge broad-leafed trees we saw in flower everywhere–panicles of white flowers with red spots. “Horse chestnuts.” Then I remembered that I had seen the tree before in New York, after the chestnuts had fallen and AJM and SAM gathered them to make conkers.

A horse chestnut tree on Wardens Way between Upper and Lower Slaughter. Watch out for the nettles!

At Hidcote Manor Garden, I suddenly caught a whiff of Texas. I stood still a moment, sniffing. Skunk? We looked around. I brushed against some large leafed plants growing in water. So this is skunk cabbage.

I recognized some things from books and movies: lilacs (Nancy Drew: The Mystery at Lilac Inn), English bluebells (Howards End), and laburnum (any book on Rosemary Verey’s garden at Barnsley House in the Cotswolds). And now I know the shade of blue named for forget-me-nots.

I fell in love with the laburnum which, to my mind, look like yellow wisteria trees. I succumbed to the temptation that every garden explorer feels; I wanted to bring it home with me. No matter how sensible we know it is to plant native plants in our gardens, who can resist the lure of all these unusual beauties? I rationalize: the laburnum is growing in the same gardens as wisteria; I grow wisteria; shouldn’t I be able to grow laburnum?

English bluebells in a field of bracken.

I was inspired by the specimens of old wisteria, carefully trained to frame the front doors of many a Cotswold cottage. Many of these houses have tiny front gardens, yet the owners managed stunning abundance of flowers by thinking vertically. My own house is sheathed in limestone which is very close in color to the creamy oolitic limestone characteristic of the Cotwolds. Now that we’ve trimmed back the cedar elms in the front, the area by the door gets full sun most of the year. Hmmm. A perfect spot for another wisteria.

Inspiring wisteria growing in Broadway.

I was thrilled to see some old friends. I don’t think there’s a tree I love more than copper beech. I might try planting some purple-leafed ornamental plum trees just to remind me of my true love.

I’m always delighted by the chrome yellow fields of rape blossom.

Stunning fields of rape blossom on the rode from Moreton-in-Marsh to Oxford.

And I remembered the nettles from our previous visit. You have to meet a nettle only once and it will sear itself into memory.

Returning to the garden after time away results in feelings tinged with expectation tempered with fear. After more than two weeks in England we arrived home at 1 in the morning. I was too tired to wander around the garden in the moonlight. I peeked through the window, though, and thought the grass looked unusually perky for this time of year.

When I woke and saw the lawn in the sunlight, the grass looked green and vigorous. Odd for August. The crape myrtles were finally blooming. And the other small flowering trees, Tecoma stans and Rose of Sharon also had flowers.

Apparently it had been unusually cool and rainy while we were gone. Good thing, too. Now we’re back to 100 degree days and I’m out watering, weeding, and mulching the first two hours of every day until the sun starts shining.

The roses are struggling. “Caldwell Pink” was suffering die-back even before we left. I’ve now pruned away two-thirds of it and the rest of it has lost its leaves. ‘Gruss an Aachen’ and ‘Souvenir de St. Anne’s’ are similarly stressed.

Overall the garden seems in not too bad a shape. I feel like tackling it again. If you’ve read The Secret Garden then you know some people’s delight in pulling away the weeds and restoring order to a garden. I’ve not quite reached that point of delight, but I’m over my reluctance. I suppose I could be coaxed into gardening again, especially after this hot spell breaks and we get some rain.

While the rest of the nation is sweltering under a massive heat wave (pity my parents in Las Vegas which reached its all time record high of 117 yesterday), here in Austin we’ve had a break from the heat. The first two weeks of July felt like August; now it feels like September. Day after day of thunderstorms brought some real rain. We had almost an inch on Friday and another inch on Sunday. Valerie report three inches at her house.

We had friends over on Saturday. You never realize how neglected the garden has become until you see it through someone else’s eyes. I was appalled. So Monday, a relatively cool 90 degree day, I was out weeding and mulching. This was the first time I’ve enjoyed being in the garden in months. The ground was pliable and all the plants, that are still alive, perked up admirably. It almost looks like a garden again.

We got only a trace of rain out of Hurricane Emily, but we did have nice shady day.

The yard is a mass of flowers and bright green foliage which makes it looks like spring outside. But it feels like winter. The heater, which is set at 60F degrees, came on last night. So this morning, I built a fire to get rid of some of the wood from last weekend’s deconstruction project.
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Well, it’s been a long time since I’ve written about the garden. I appreciate people writing to say they’ve missed my updates (thanks Pam and Rantor). I really don’t know what’s wrong with me. It’s as if the gardening fever has run its course. Is that possible? I thought that once the bug had bit, you were a gardener forever. And for the last ten years I’ve spent several hours a day in the garden and almost as much time again writing or reading about gardens.
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This picture lies. I wish the garden really were as cool and inviting as this picture makes it look. But it isn’t. I took this shot of the oxblood lilies about 10 on Saturday morning. It was only in the mid-80s, but very muggy–the kind of summer weather that makes you retreat inside to a cold lemonade. I had just mown the lawn the night before, and with our rain last week it’s greened up. But the telephoto lens compresses the focus, making tha garden seem more compact and comely than it is.

My neighbor’s yard is a mass of lantana right now and I benefit because the butterflies it attracts wander over to my yard. They seem fond of the garlic chives. I have some lantana, too. But I have too much shade to suit it and it rarely blooms.

Our third day of wonderfully cool temperatures in a row has got me out nosing in the garden again, tidying up here and there.

During my week stay with my parents in Las Vegas, I continued to be very much impressed with the xeriscape designs along the streets and medians as well as the very small, but well-landscaped yards. Two-thirds of Las Vegas didn’t exist when I lived there as a teenager. The desert is bull-dozed as new development is laid like a giant grid in the valley and the landscaping is newly installed, a bit crisp, clean and artificial like the houses. All the neighborhoods are sheltered from the major streets with cinder block walls. Most of the newer developments also include a wide (not greenspace but) planted space between the street and the walls. The design of these xeriscape spaces is delicately fluid and much more attractive than either mown grass or decorative rock landscapes of my past.
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When I arrived home at 4 this morning, I slipped out into the moonlit garden even before disturbing the sleeping boys with my “I’m home”. Plants looked bigger, the grass was longer, and the paths a little overrun with weeds.
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