You Grow Girl™

Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“Winter is the malady, while flowers, blessed flowers, are the antidote.”

I am suffering from late-season gardening. It’s a disease that I’m sure must be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) next to bipolar illness. It starts every year in mid-July and builds until by September I would really rather visit someone else’s garden than look at my own. Heck, I’d rather move.

Joy and I garden extensively for colour. That’s what we long for after a craven, grey winter—give us hue, give us saturation, give us a field of crocus exploding yellow and purple heads through tufts of winter debris. And keep it coming. I want daffodils yellow as egg yolks and tulips red as rubies and irises purple as Easter. I want red roses and cream foxgloves and poppies the colour of dawn. I want clematis thrown over arbors like blankets. I want an extravaganza. I want to use up all the synonyms for all the colours in the thesaurus. I want to look out my windows and see pink—rose-pink and flesh-pink and salmon-pink. I want to look out and see purple—lilac, orchid, lavender, mauve, plum, violet. I want to see yellow—gold, citron, honey, butter, quince, saffron, topaz, banana, tawny, amber, ecru. It’s been cold, it’s been colourless, it’s been dark, it’s been hard to get up in the morning. Winter is the malady, while flowers, blessed flowers, are the antidote. Never mind the emergency ward and our ailing medical system; for the best cure, gardeners just have to step outside.

I have friends who garden with foliage more than flower—moss and fern and hosta retreats that make me imagine a forest—and other friends who garden for low maintenance with junipers, cedars and cotoneasters. None of them seem to suffer from late-season gardening disease, or if they do, they’re not fessing up.

Me, by halfway through the summer, I’m pooped. All used up. I’ve composted and fertilized and deadheaded and staked and watered and sprayed till I feel, well… A year older. I’ve got colour-fatigue. I’m all done in. Let me just slide into a Muskoka chair, put up my feet, sip from a tall perspiring glass of lemonade, close my eyes and drift away to the sound of lawnmowers and buzzing bees.

Let the fall begin! What’s August anyhow? August is just the long windup to September, and it’s full of my least favourite flowers like mums and asters and dahlias. Fall, in a family with kids, is inevitably a hard month of adjustments to new schedules and grades and teachers. Or, in my family with older children, tuition time, the joy of even more bills is upon us. The promise of spring—all its claims that we can be reborn—are proved falsehoods. The kids need textbooks; the kids need computers; the kids need bus passes.

Even the garden is worn out. You can zsush the damned thing one day, carefully removing all the eyesores and yellow leaves, and the next day it looks like you never touched it. There’s the raspy, rattling sound of seedpods maturing. Ever notice how much better the garden looks under cloud? The relentless sun makes the garden look washed out. Like me, it’s growing tired and tattered. There are jobs on the job list’water for 2 hours a day, handholding as per city restrictions; identify empty spots left by dying or dead spring flowers and fill them with current-bloomers; weed so the pesky little things don’t grow into gigantic problems; design for next spring; control the burgeoning population of insects.

Or sit on your keester while your mate tries to tip you free of the chair.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the award-winning author of four books. She grew up in Ontario, lived in St. Louis, Phoenix, NYC, Alberta, the Kootenays and on Salt Spring Island before settling in Vancouver. You can find out more about her at www.janeeatonhamilton.com.

Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“Hang on tight. Because it appears that foliage is the new flower.”

It’s winter, and I’m hibernating like a big old bear in my cave (which, thankfully, comes equipped with a fireplace and a martini glass), but I’ve still been keeping one ear twitchng towards fads, and let me tell you, boys and girls, the news isn’t good. Did you know orange is the new pink? I’m not kidding you. Call it what you want to disguise it—russet, carrot—but at bottom it’s just orange, orange as a countertop from the 1970s. Which, if I’m reading right, means the lot of us need to hustle our butts outside after the groundhog doesn’t see her shadow and rip out everything—and I do mean everything—pink. Pink is apparently so yesterday. And not just pink, darlings. Hang on tight. Because it appears that foliage is the new flower.

And, by the way—while we’re at it, you don’t just plant your garden anymore, you decorate it. Your fences and beds are the bones corresponding to ceiling height, molding and floors in the living room. They come first, then you choose shrubs and trees the way you choose sofas and chairs, with an eye to shape, colour and—can this be true?—comfort, and then you accessorize around them. I’m looking for a little something to set off the redbud, you can now say at the garden store, a little something in beige, please. No, not yellow. My skin tones are completely incompatible. You crass little beast. Do you expect me to wander around my garden looking totally sallow?

When you’re agonizing over seed catalogues this winter, think subdued. Think monochromatic, think simplicity, think cool elegance. Choose an all-white border to brighten the shade or an all-blue border for instant calm. Think texture and subtle shades. Think classic understatement. Restrain, restrain, restrain. No more clashing. No more stripes and plaids together. No more mixed containers. And accessorize, accessorize, accessorize. With veggies. It’s de rigueur.

Out with all those depraved delphiniums, those hussying harebells, those sluttish shastas. Think chartreuse. Think variegation, a scintillating sliver of yellow on the edge of a kelly green leaf, as in hosta. And of course, while you are thinking simple, don’t forget the dash of—oh, I shudder—tangerine.

Oh, and think (no matter where you live, whether in the caressing warmth of Victoria or the buffeting cold of Thunder Bay) tropicals. Think palm, tree fern, banana, hibiscus, bouganvillea, bromeliads, gingers, plumerias.

When I complained to a friend about this edict, and about the loss of yet another Tasmanian tree fern in Vancouver’s hither we are and yon we are not weather rollercoaster, he just suggested I might rent a greenhouse for winter storage.

As if. Can you imagine me just as the winter winds start to howl, grunting my palm trees and bananas out of the ground, balancing them onto dollies for the wobbling trips to the car, hoisting them into the trunk (and how would I manage this? A crane?) for the drive to my Fraser Valley winter-nursery-of-choice? I am just not that addicted. Lord, this year I wasn’t even addicted enough to mulch, and I can already confirm the loss of the banana to the January cold snap. The agapanthus clings on by slimy brown leaf stalks. Here’s my take on tropicals: winter accomplishes what I’d never have time or gumption enough to accomplish on my own—by turfing the tender out so there’s room for the new.

Not new orange. Not new variegated. Not new tropical. Just whatever garish, galumphing, gorgeous gewgaw takes my fancy in the nursery.

Sure, the Arbiter of Good Taste is bound to drop by. He hangs out in my neighbourhood, doesn’t he? Just loves the east end, he does. You know the fellow’strolls up and down the street wearing a bowler hat, clearing his throat, twirling a brolly, pursing his lips, and pressing a monocle to his eye while he records all my gardening flaws for posterity. And I have many gardening flaws, don’t I? About these I am still not entirely sanguine—and this itself, it seems to me, is among the worst of my flaws. I sometimes catch myself up in the trends of the day, dreaming about doing dangerous things to my dicentras, or, damn it, learning to love orange. Why can’t I just ignore all the experts once and for all? If I like pink petunias, whole islands of them, who’s to say I shouldn’t have them? And if I don’t want to accessorize with veggies, really, who’s to make me?

A clever cabbage would look fetching with that fedegosa, darling. So what, so what, so what! Leave me alone!

Let us praise the status quo. Plants were welcomed to the status quo for a reason. Plants got to be popular because people, lots of people, recognized them as a good thing. The right plant for the right place. A stalwart grower. A show-stopping colour. A winsome seedpod. So even if it pleases a million other folks, if it also pleases you, grow it. Why not? After all, the experts spend a lot of time obsessing about gardening, enough time to get sick of even the most sumptuous flower. Overexposure breeds contempt, or at least boredom, and the experts become desperate for something new, anything new, never mind whether or not it’s hideous. We adequate gardeners don’t have to be governed by the same dictates.

Never mind what the gurus say. If they want nine of some etiolated white nothings in that curve near the maple, but you want two pink dahlias, go with the dahlias. If they want a garden of foliage with accents of orange, but you want a garden as soft and romantic and pink as Monet’s, plant it. And then you can accessorize not with veggies (unless you want to), but with the experts’ articles. Given the recent switch to all-vegetable dyes in printing, they’ll make excellent mulch.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the award-winning author of four books. She grew up in Ontario, lived in St. Louis, Phoenix, NYC, Alberta, the Kootenays and on Salt Spring Island before settling in Vancouver. You can find out more about her at www.janeeatonhamilton.com.

Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“You still grow annuals?”

I was visiting a friend’s garden and I happened to mention that I’d forgotten to thin my annual poppies, so now I was in jeopardy of losing the entire dell, and my friend, he of the upscale collector garden on the nice side of town, looked at me and said, incredulously, “You still grow annuals?”

As if I’d fallen off Mars clutching a bouquet of striped petunias.

I hesitate to report that just for an instant I burned with deep shame. I’d been caught. I hung my head and stammered about the seedlings just being from old, leftover seeds I was trying to use up, when I noticed what a doorknob I was being. I shook my head and reminded myself that I love annuals. That I value annuals. That gardening without annuals would be like a summer without swimming, or a picnic without potato chips, or a living room without chairs. Something quintessential would be missing.

Just because a plant is popular doesn’t make it substandard. How could a plant lose beauty by being grown in many gardens, or gain beauty by being grown in only a few? Why would a common plant be mocked and discarded merely for the crime of not being exotic? If you don’t have to build a cage around it, wrap it in burlap and stuff it full of leaves to get it through the winter, it’s no good? If you don’t have to dig it up and bury it in dry peat moss under the porch it’s inferior? Imagine if people had to meet that criteria! Please. I am myself as common as worms, but some people still think I’m useful.

So are my annuals.

“I wouldn’t mind a bit if suddenly all my perennials shriveled up and died and I was forced to garden exclusively with annuals.”

I wouldn’t mind a bit if suddenly all my perennials shriveled up and died and I was forced to garden exclusively with annuals. There are worse fates. These are the garden plants that give me bang for my buck, plants with pep and vinegar, vim and vigor. No mooning around nine-tenths of the year with nary a bloom to be found, like those lazy perennials. These guys have to get growing, bloom, have their Green Giant equivalent of a romp in the hay and make babies all in a few short months, or be kicked off the evolutionary ladder. If October arrives and there’s no seedpod cracking open and spewing its cargo to the wind, it’s curtains for an annual. They won’t be back. Whereas perennials, the sods, well perennials, what do they care for flower and seed? They’re coming back anyhow year after year

Have you ever wasted your time deadheading a perennial? Deadheading is supposed to panic the plant into thinking it hasn’t bloomed yet so that it’ll push out another flower. But perennials, most of them, don’t much care. They just shrug and yawn and go back to whatever they were already doing, like peering in the windows to catch a glimpse of Canadian Idol. Whereas annuals you can just about hear an indignant little scream when you snap off a spent bloom. The plant hip hops around the bed like a rap artist. If they could talk, the lyrics would be XXX-rated. Man I was done, I was minding my crew, when this fierce _____ came and snapped me in two. But once an annual takes to the amputation, it uses its juice to pop out new blooms like bullets.

So, yeah, I could tell my friend. I still grow annuals. My faves are heliotrope, cleome, scarlet flax, godetia and blue salvia. Wanna make something of it? I have a garden as cool, in its miniature, disorganized way, as Kew.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the award-winning author of four books. She grew up in Ontario, lived in St. Louis, Phoenix, NYC, Alberta, the Kootenays and on Salt Spring Island before settling in Vancouver. You can find out more about her at www.janeeatonhamilton.com.

Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“Fine Gardening commissioned an article on poppies, and they wanted to fly up to Vancouver to photograph mine.”

Joy and I started gardening with one proviso: We could garden our little hearts out, landscaping and tilling every inch of our 120 foot by 33 foot lot into beds and paths and even grottos, but we would never-ever-say yes to being on a garden tour. Sure, we craved the notice. What gardener doesn’t? This is a big green-eyed beast, this ego stuff. Almost as soon as Joy and I had started to dig, we longed to hear that our garden was beautiful, timeless, serene. Why, look at your drifts! Your clumps! Your cascades! We’re rabid for praise. We want to know through others’ eyes that what we wish was true really is true: There’s been no other garden in history as lovely as ours. (Or at least as lovely as ours was last week. If only the visitor had seen it when the roses were in full bloom, when the blue poppies were flowering, just after the grass was cut, before the storm dragged the peonies to the ground.) If we said yes to a tour, we’d be big shots. We’d be the Hobhouses of Hatterly. The Sackville-Wests of Simon Avenue East. The Hinkleys of Huron. It could happen. It could happen to us! Why not? Why not us?

But any notice that came our way, we suspected, would be bound to swell our heads. Which in turn would destroy the purity and pleasure of gardening. Stamping our feet over newly planted bulbs, we agreed we would never-ever-assent to having our garden photographed for a magazine. We began to garden because we love the process-the peace, the beauty, the relaxation, the hard physical workout of it. We wanted the yard to function as respite from the rush and noise of the city around us: a place to rest our weary spirits. Loveliness for the sake of loveliness, not editors.

But boy hardy, never say never. Fine Gardening commissioned an article on poppies, and they wanted to fly up to Vancouver to photograph mine. I admit that I didn’t even contemplate declining. Writing is what I do for a living, and if a garden shoot is part of the gig, well, who am I to say no? Values? Out the window. The editor and I settled on the last week of June, the likeliest time for the biggest variety of annual poppies to be blooming.

“Joy and I began to chant, like some funereal dirge: Fine Gardening’s coming Fine Gardening’s coming Fine Gardening’s coming.”

This was in March, when Joy and I were smack in the middle of a frenzy of renovation. Idiots that we are, we had decided to install a hottub, but the porch needed to be demolished, and a cement pad poured, and a door cut into the side of the house, and a change room built, and a deck laid, and trellis erected, and then, because our electrical wasn’t upgraded, we had to replace our stove with one fueled by gas, only when it arrived, it bumped up against the closet, so we had to knock it out, but the closet had a sunken floor and a raised ceiling, necessitating great swacks of drywalling. Meantime, due to overhead wires, the hottub was craned into the backyard from the street-over the neighbour’s house. Everything got delayed and delayed again. Tempers flared.

Joy and I began to chant, like some funereal dirge: Fine Gardening’s coming Fine Gardening’s coming Fine Gardening’s coming. Threatening the workmen. Threatening each other. Any upkeep or improvement that might have been fun given a leisurely schedule was now accordioned into two short months, and included such unlikely tasks as oiling and sharpening garden tools lest the FG editor catch a glimpse of them. Have you ever painted trellis? I did, around the hottub, triangle by repetitious two-sided triangle until I wanted to twist the stem of every poppy that had led me down this vain garden path. Everything had to be perfect. Do you hear me, Joy? Perfect! Perfect, I say!

Most foolish of all, I grew annual poppies in seed flats instead of sewing them where they belonged, scattered among the beds where they’d rise in naturalistic waves. I was paranoid that FG would need to know the exact variety of every poppy they saw (like Papaver rhoeas ‘Angel’s Choir’), for labeling purposes, and what if I didn’t know, exactly? What if I hadn’t quite memorized every last one? Ever the zealot, I had snatched up nearly 30 unique seed packs from a wide assortment of nurseries. There’s a problem transplanting poppies because of long tap roots which hate disturbance, so feeling congratulatory and brilliant, I sprinkled my oh-so-plentiful seeds on top of luxuriously deep toilet paper tubes I could, ostensibly, just transfer to the ground come April. But the seeds only reluctantly germinated, no matter how I stood over them huffing and puffing. More worrying still, there seemed to be hardly any back-up poppies coming up in the garden beds.

“Grow, I pled each morning. Grow, I whispered each evening, and grow they did, by leaps and bounds, in nitrogen-rich handfuls of greenery.”

Oops! It didn’t quite take until April for the toilet paper tubes to biodegrade. Within days the constantly damp cardboard disintegrated into a moldy mess, taking with them down the drain much of my damped-off crop. I murmured sweet nothings to the rest, and they at least flourished. Eventually, when I could spare a minute from the ferocious demands of renovation, I tweezed tangled tap roots from the undifferentiated mess of potting soil and black moldy toilet paper tubes, and lowered them like rescuers on ropes into pre-dug holes. Grow, I pled each morning. Grow, I whispered each evening, and grow they did, by leaps and bounds, in nitrogen-rich handfuls of greenery. Oops again. In March, just as soon as I accepted the assignment, Joy and I had dumped the finest top soil we could find, half a foot of it, all over the beds in a foolhardy attempt to impress the editor with the lushness of our garden.

It was lush, really lush, but with hardly any flowers. There was nary a poppy bud to be seen.

Late June arrived, and with it the editor. Our garden was beside itself with beauty, putting on a show to rival New York’s Broadway, except there was-

Well, you can see it coming, in this slapstick idiocy I call my life, and you’re right. Yup — not a single annual poppy in bloom. No somniferums, no rhoeas, no nudicaule, no californicas. The article had to be entirely illustrated with poppies from other people’s gardens.

Hubris, that’s what the whole thing was. Mine. All around town annual poppies bent in gentle breezes, letting the editor from Fine Gardening know the failure wasn’t Vancouver’s oddly cold spring, but rather me, the inadequate gardener, so desperate to impress that I’d blown the whole experience.

And my poppies? They bloomed as if sniggering at me, hundreds upon hundreds, exactly two weeks late, splendidly.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the award-winning author of four books. She grew up in Ontario, lived in St. Louis, Phoenix, NYC, Alberta, the Kootenays and on Salt Spring Island before settling in Vancouver. You can find out more about her at www.janeeatonhamilton.com.

Guest post by Jane Eaton Hamilton

“Doesn’t anyone just take it easy anywhere at any time anymore? Pass me a beer. I never studied Latin. I just want to grow plants.”

I’m that frustrated, really. I’m climbing a braid of tangled clematis like it’s Rapunzel’s hair. This one’s a Clematis montana (what’s the story with all this C montana this and P orientale that and all those unnameable names and this part gets italicized and this part doesn’t and this part needs a capital and this doesn’t? Doesn’t anyone just take it easy anywhere at any time anymore? Pass me a beer. I never studied Latin. I just want to grow plants.) A C. montana growing all the way to the attic window, and I’m scaling it to escape the clematis police. Look at them down there, ten prissy UK gardeners with permed hair, pursed lips and clipboards. The first time I went to make a pruning cut, their whistles shrilled and they forced me to hand over my secateurs, and then the bunch of them did a football huddle around them making clucking noises. Rust, I heard, and dull cutting blade, and Doesn’t she ever oil her implements? and Probably carrying bacteria. I heard a righteous sniff. They’re just cheap clippers anyhow. They’re hardly Felcos. All this down their substantial noses. Well, darn the clematis police to heck anyway. I leaned over one woman’s shoulder chip and snatched my clippers back. They may not be the best maintained clippers in the world, but on the other hand, I find time to watch ER. So sue me.

“…I was so bloody busy working and cooking and vaccuming and yelling at the kids and finding time for Sex and the City that it was all I could do just to shove the damn thing in the ground…”

I got the idea the clematis police, at least, would like to sue me. I was standing back from the first clematis I saw whose colour I just couldn’t remember — uh, purple, maybe? Many of them are purple of some shade with even the whites a bit purple-tinged, so it was a safe guess, probably, and if I hadn’t been so busy going to work and raising kids and making dinner and drinking martinis under the garden heater and laughing with my friends last summer I might have bothered to actually notice, and I might have written it down, a notation, and while I was at it I might even have written down what group (A, B or C) the wretched plant was in to begin with, but of course that should have happened when I planted it, only when I planted it (and the 30 or so others) I was so bloody busy working and cooking and vaccuming and yelling at the kids and finding time for Sex and the City that it was all I could do just to shove the damn thing in the ground in a more or less prepared hole (a dug hole, that is) and I probably didn’t even plant it at the right depth which is six inches of stem in the ground because, go figure, the stem will grow roots, and then naturally I left the tag on it but the tag was just plastic the width of a dime and very crackable, and of course it cracked, and the part that didn’t break off bleached in the sun (though how is that possible since the roots of the clematis are supposed to be in the shade, so how could a tag be sunbleached, huh, huh, if it was a properly planted clematis? Huh? Huh? With a tag near the bottom of the stem where no sun is supposed to shine sort of like certain areas of one’s bathing suit? And anyway, if roots are underground aren’t they by definition shaded? I mean, no one ever said my ancestors were pushing up daisies six feet under basking in sunshine, did they?) And anyway, the tag did crack and the tag did bleach and with it went all the info I had on the clematis so why couldn’t I just hack at it? Huh? “Would that be all right with you guys?“

“Humph, they said as one. You are speaking, we believe, of the genus CLEMatis. Kindly refer to said plant as CLEMatis in all future speech.”

The UK gardeners weren’t looking. They were busily conferring and scratching on their clipboards. Was that a paddy wagon siren I heard coming to take me to jail for breaking clematis laws?

I had no idea what they’d do to me if I guessed wrong, so I shouted, “Would it be all right with you guys if I just cut this clematis any which place on its stem?”

The clematis police turned as one monolithic creature and laid half-lidded eyes upon me. Their pens poised above their clipboards. ì“xcuse us. Did we just hear you just say—”

And here they couldn’t bring themselves to actually repeat it. They stalled, this one-voiced creature, speechless. But then they went on. “Did we just hear you just say — clemAtis?”

Darn, darn, darn. I did. I said it just like that. I suppose I should have been gnashing my teeth and renting my raiments.

“Humph,” they said as one. “You are speaking, we believe, of the genus CLEMatis. Kindly refer to said plant as CLEMatis in all future speech.”

“Nuts to you,” I said.

And they just stood there, open-mouthed. Many of them had amalgam fillings which I hoped were leaking mercury.

“You know the secret with clemAtis?” I shouted. “You know what it is? If you don’t prune ëem right, they still grow. If you don’t prune ëem at all, they still grow. Nothing bad happens. World War III doesn’t break out. They just bloom up higher, is all.”

“They might wilt,” said the officious poops.

“Dudes,” I said, “pruning doesn’t stop wilt. Clematis get a fungus. If I see drooping leaves, and I happen to have time, I cut the stem a couple inches down past it and hope the thing survives. Or if I’m busy, I let it go and hope that next year it doesn’t wilt again. But sometimes it does.”

Their Stepford mouths open in unison. “Prune your CLEMatis in its proper groups. Don’t prune group A. Prune group B lightly for shape. Prune group C a foot from the ground.” And then suddenly they’re chanting. “Prune your CLEMatis prune your CLEMatis prune your CLEMatis prune your CLEMatis prune your CLEMatis.”

That’s when I hightailed it up the C. montana towards the attic, an overstuffed chair, my TV clicker and a beer.

Jane Eaton Hamilton is the award-winning author of four books. She grew up in Ontario, lived in St. Louis, Phoenix, NYC, Alberta, the Kootenays and on Salt Spring Island before settling in Vancouver. You can find out more about her at www.janeeatonhamilton.com.