PG Kerry Ann

I’ve found them at last!  Tall, shapely and aluminum… not, my tin-man to be, but my long sought after containers.  Since my garden’s inception I knew I wanted aluminum containers to provide height and luster to my garden.  Joyce accurately observed in an early review that my garden had a lot of fine textures.  However, it had no “WOW” to balance those looser forms.  The garden needed “BIGGER,” “BOLDER,” and a touch “TROPICAL.”  I could not agree more (minus the tropical part).  I would not consider myself a “tropical” person and definitely, not a “tropical in the ground” person—there is a very big distinction there, I think.  Just look at the difference in Kenny’s garden and mine and you might recognize the implicit differences between people who plant their tropical and those who simply place them in pots.

I digress . . . so while I may not consider myself a “tropical” person, I am not one who will not play or try to push her own boundaries.  Joyce is right on:  I need bold to contrast my beautiful finely foliated perennials; I need big and bright to pop amongst my many smaller, floating inflorescences.  And most importantly, I need to broaden my plant repertoire, which is limited to naturalizing perennials of the Northeast.  However, I will only set tropicals in containers of which I had already anticipated.

I set wood pads in my garden waiting for the “perfect” containers to appear.  By mid summer I started to think I’d have to weld or rivet my own aluminum creations UNTIL, while working at Chanticleer, I saw (and coveted) large, aluminum cut flower containers.  Their containers came from Romania (?) but, being a former Homegoods employee (8 years ago)—I know they often carry cheaper (I hope) knock offs.    This is so important to me because I want my gardens to have common elements, and there are accents of aluminum in my vegetable garden: my solanaceous and cucurbit crops are supported on aluminum posts and in a corner sits a wash tub of cut flowers.  I also anticipate making votive holders of punched aluminum cans to dance on my posts.  I want to pull this industrial shine into my wilder ornamental bed; but the container also needed to be tall and narrow to rise above my spikes and spires.  This also lifts my whatever-accent plant above the pleasant “mayhem” below, giving it even greater status as garden royalty. 

The tropicals available to me right now are cannas, datura and oleander.  The cannas are striking but the Oleander is too loose.  There is a pair of elephant ears in Dan Hill’s garden, but they are so large that I might like them in the ground (oh my, maybe Kenny is contagious!)

Does all this non-plant babble merit a blog?  I think so because each find or purchase brings me closer to realizing a garden that from day one, I had in my head very exactly.  Honestly, I could not fathom actually fashioning it from nothing—no or little money and no plants.  But it is coming together… just wait until I start designing mood lighting and soundscaping!

As everything in my garden expands, some up, others out and even some around each other, the edges of my garden remain just mulch.  The ornamental portion of my garden is not meant to be rigid, orthogonal and crisply edged—that would be my vegetable garden (and should only be my vegetable garden as far as I am concerned).  This garden, on the other hand, needs to spill.  Plants should encroach on the paving—not by much but enough to soften the edge.  I’ve always admired the edges in the Conservatory gardens here.  They are rounded by a bright green, finely textured mounding annual (tears?).  When I first walked the gardens last summer I thought it was a weed, a miraculously uniform and well behaved weed, but a weed all the same, like chick weed.  But it didn’t detract from the plantings; instead, it finished the beds.  If the adjective “polish” could be applied to horticulture, then this diminutive groundcover “polished” the look.  Imagine my sheepish relief when I discovered the weed was intentional. 

Its attributed are: size (height and spread), and some other quality whose word eludes me that best describes a plant that simply enhances other plants.  Perhaps greenness or fluffiness or maybe evenness of coverage?  Something of this ilk is what I’d like to finish the borders of my garden.  I had considered carpet alyssum (At Planting Fields Arboretum, I had seen it edge a walkway of roses beautifully), but I am concerned about its ranginess later in the season.  And as lovely as an abundance of little flowers might be, I also do not want to attract bees where they might be under foot (especially since one or two PG’s like wandering the gardens bare foot).  That also eliminates fleabane or thyme.  There is a product line called “Steppable” that might have a low growing, semi-tread resistant, green “something” to soften my edge.  I have to check it out.

The two most problematic bugs for me in my ornamental garden are cucumber beetle and harlequin bug.   I could not enumerate the bugs in my garden.  I rarely notice the good bugs and sometimes I bump into a bee (they get too close to my ear and startle me).  I had the pleasure of fostering a swallowtail caterpillar in metamorphosis at London’s request on my Northern Sea Oats.  And a handful of fat monarch butterfly caterpillars are on my Swan Plant now.  But these two pests are obnoxious.  Cucumber beetle decimated my amaranths.  And right now, Harlequin beetle is chewing through my cleome with determination. 

An ambition that may not come to fruition is a rubble tower, which I may have mentioned earlier.  Having come from apartment living, I‘ve never had a spot of dirt to call my own. Vertical gardening is a swank idea that’s not entirely new but gaining popularity.  In my garden, I wanted to replicate the conditions of a rocky slope or mountain side, complete with thin deposits of soil in nooks and crannies from which various adapted plants could poke out from or cling to for dear life.  The area designated for this megalithic masterpiece would be 3’ x 3’, and the structure would stand 6’ tall.  In a book I saw an exterior stone wall finish where plants were encouraged to exploit the cracks and spaces in-between stone.  It utilized chicken wire, so I scavenged chicken wire and eyed broken rock everywhere.  But now, as I look in my garden, this plant or that plant has staked claim in the same area that would be my construction site.  I’ll have to wait until winter when the cold has subdued the ambitions of my perennials.  If only the cold would subdue my own ambitions—like  setting a basin at the rubbles’ base for a small water bog.  Give me 15’ x 15’ of dirt and I’ll try to reproduce all the earth’s geographic regions.

I think I need to distinguish between alpines and other rock garden plants:  according to Wikipedia Alpine plants are plants specially adapted to habituate mountainous slopes above the tree line approaching perpetual frost.  They exist in higher altitudes, are often morphologically dwarf and profusely blooming.  To translate into the garden, alpines like cooler climates, cold nights, frosty water (snow and ice run off), thin alkaline soils and short growing seasons (see Alpine Plants:  Ecology for Gardeners by John E.G. Good).  This means, I can not grow alpines.

I thought, because of the shallowness of my garden table (less than 3” of medium) which like an extensive green roof can only support “shallow plants,”  I could grow a diversity of “alpines.”  Oh, I was excited because I flip through the “Alpine” section of Sunny Borders’ catalog at least a dozen times a month.  I like miniature plants.  At last, I could make a collection of wee- specimens.  In a lot of the literature, there isn’t a distinction between rock garden plants and alpine plants.  The two are used interchangeably and erroneously. Alpines are not ALWAYS viable rock garden plants and not in Kennett Square, PA.  This area’ hot summers and equally hot nights zap these chilly plants.  And in the case of my table especially, there isn’t an undercurrent of cold water to refrigerate root systems against excessive heat.  My table is a hot rockery. 

Even my sedums aren’t thriving.  In my neighbor’s garden, her sedums are planted in lightly amended soil and sheltered within a micro-valley.  Though she doesn’t water, they are still moist enough and protected enough and cooled enough; and they are magnificent.

I’ll have to really review Colorado State University Extension (www.ext.colostate.edu) list of rock plants or Emery Knolls’ recommendations for green roofs in the Northeast.  Location is everything.