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.