Perennial Wisdom with Judith Fetterley

Well, it’s been a busy two weeks in the garden since last I wrote. Kevin and I have been doing chores that I have never been able to get to before because I have never had the time. One of these chores was clearing out the dead wood on the several blue spruces that define my garden.

The Colorado blue spruce is doomed. It has fallen victim to the Rhizosphaera needle cast, a fungal disease, caused by Rhizosphaera kalkhoffii (don’t you just love the name?) that attacks the needles of Colorado blue spruce in the spring, as new needles emerge. Of all the foliar diseases affecting woody landscape plants and shrubs, needle casts are the most serious for the simple reason that coniferous plants do not have the ability to refoliate, or to produce a second flush of needles from defoliated stems.

I have been keeping my blue spruces alive for the last several years by means of an annual spring and summer spraying. This year, however, Davey’s has dissed me. After confirming that my annual treatment plan was on schedule, they have not showed up to spray nor have they returned my many, increasingly frantic, calls. I don’t mind so much that they dissed me, but dissing my trees is unforgiveable.

Unable to do anything about the newly emerging and rapidly dying growth, Kevin and I decided at least we could clean out the old dead wood, accumulated over years of gradual decline. For three hours we lopped, we pruned, we dragged away. We didn’t look at the results of our work until we were done.

In most cases the results met the two criteria deemed essential by this gardener: the job was good enough and the trees looked better than they had before we started. In one case, however, the result was painful to witness. At the end of the line of spruces that form the back boundary of my property was a tree with a huge hole on one side halfway up the trunk.

We were horrified. Kevin reminded me that Sara had come out and mentioned something about an emerging bare spot, and that I had told him to continue lopping because the choice was between a bare spot and a mass of dead branches. Neither of us was prepared for the size of the hole we had made. I think we might have made a mistake.

A perfectionist by nature, I have never liked making mistakes. In school,I always focused on what I got wrong, not what I got right. 99% correct? What did I miss? But now I am a gardener, and gardeners are persons who make mistakes, lots of them. Stephanie Cohen’s The Non-Stop Gardener, one of my favorite go-to books, carries an endorsement by Steve Aiken, the editor of Fine Gardening: “I wish I had the Non-Stop Garden when I was starting out. It would have saved me plenty of trial-and-error.” Nonsense. I don’t think Aiken really believes this. Every gardener I have ever known says the same thing: “Read all you want, but you will never become a gardener unless your get out in the garden and make mistakes.”

I have become a gardener and it has led me to think differently about mistakes. I recall, clearly, the words of my first instructor at the Institute for Ecosystems Study where I got my Certificate in Garden Design. As I absorbed her passion for native shrubs and perennials, I absorbed as well her exhortation: “If you are not out there killing plants, you are not doing horticulture.” From her I learned that mistakes are not the sign of doing something wrong but the sign that you are doing something right.

Don’t get me wrong. Terrible things can happen to plants in gardens. In future newsletters I am sure I will be unable to restrain my need to rant about bad pruning practices and murderous lawn care. But these practices deserve a word far stronger than “mistakes.” How about “arborcide?”

Making mistakes as a gardener is inevitable and most mistakes are fixable. Plants, after all, are remarkably resilient. The Clematis you accidentally snipped off while cutting back dead daffodil foliage will most likely come back. The Viburnum you top-pruned, producing an ugly array of sprouts, can be re-pruned into decent shape over time. The Hosta that you thought might take more sun than most can be moved when it becomes clear that it can’t.

Mistakes can even become the source of opportunity. Perhaps you realize this year that last year’s brilliant idea for a garden based on opposing colors—red and green, blue and orange, yellow and violet—is not working out for you. Instead of demonstrating a fundamental principle of color, it is just a jumble, and way too busy. Now you have an opportunity to try a new “hot” garden of red, yellow, and orange. All you have to do is remove the blue and violet, and no doubt this removal will inspire you to start another garden of cool colors. Has that lovely red maple whiplash you planted a few years ago grown far larger than you thought possible, putting an end to your perfectly positioned sun-garden of poppies and phlox and echinacea? Consider it an opportunity to explore the magic of shade gardening and to focus on foliage.

Much creativity and energy can come from making mistakes, surviving them, and turning them to your own purposes. When people ask me how I came up with the design for my garden, I often quip that what they are admiring is simply the history of my mistakes. But now I have a problem. What should I do about the substantial hole Kevin and I have created in this one blue spruce by pruning out all its dead wood?

Do I leave it alone and enjoy the peephole it offers into my neighbor’s garden? Do I go so far as to label the hole “intentional,’ an effort to imitate on a small scale the Japanese art of the borrowed view? Do I go even further and prove my intention by pointing out the rather lovely shape of the hole? Do I try to plant a shrub underneath the pine that might fill the hole? Or do I look to hardscape for a solution, perhaps a sculpture? Then I could say as well that I made the hole on purpose to showcase the sculpture. Given this context, perhaps no one will notice the relative mutilation of the spruce tree.

I am leaning toward the latter approach and will let you know if I find an appropriate sculpture. But I must admit that the borrowed view is beginning to charm, especially as it includes a glimpse of my neighbor’s fish pond.

Meanwhile, many of you asked to see a photo of “The Grim Reaper,” aka “Hawaiian Dancer.” Here are a couple. You can see the blue spruces behind him or her.

Welcome to “Out in the Garden,” my bi-weekly newsletter featuring stories of life in my garden. I hope my stories will delight, inform, and provoke my readers. Please let me know if they do. And please share my newsletter with any others whom you think might enjoy it.

Our relationship to plants is fundamental to our well-being on this planet, yet we often treat plants very badly. I hope that in a small way my stories might help to put us as humans in a better relationship with plants. As a gardener, I learn a lot from plants about what it means to be a person, but I also learn a lot about the larger world that is not human. To be out in the garden is, for me, a joy and a journey.

The title of my newsletter (and memoir in process) comes from a column I wrote a few years ago for Community, the newspaper of the Capital District Pride Center. I called the column “Out in the Garden” to play on the two meanings of “out” relevant to the context – out of the house and out of the closet. But it is actually rather difficult to be “out” in the garden as a lesbian. Does one say to the neighbor passing by and asking a question about a particular plant, “Why, yes, that is a dwarf lilac and as a lesbian I find it a very useful plant for the small garden.”  Or perhaps when giving a talk on Lower-Maintenance Gardening I might say, “Speaking as a lesbian, I think it important to point out that lower maintenance plants have many of the characteristics we associate with weeds.” Unlikely, so for now I will tell about the other meaning of “out” and its roots, which go deep.

I got my love of gardening from my mother. She got her love of gardening from her father. She worshipped her father. Coming home from school, she would ask her mother, “Where is Dad,” and the answer was always, “Out in the garden, dear.”  My grandfather emigrated from Ireland as a young boy but all his life he treasured the memory of his mother, another gardener. My gardening lineage goes back to a cottage in Ireland.

My passion for being outside goes back to my infancy when, according to my mother, I could always be counted on to sleep deeply in my baby buggy outside on the back porch. I evidently expressed my passion for being outside as soon as I could talk. “Out” was one of my first words, and one of my first sentences conveyed the message, “I go out now.” My mother told me she could not keep shoes or socks on my feet or me inside.

Here I am, so many years later, still going out, but now of course with feet well protected by good boots and sweat-absorbing socks. Unlike the claim made by politicians and rarely fulfilled that “everything changes on day 1,” for me there is a day when everything really does change and I become a gardener again. I am out in the garden on April 1, come rain or sun or even snow. And I stay out until the end of November when darkness and the increasing cold finally force me inside. I am out early in the morning and late in the afternoon and any time in between that is possible before the heat makes it impossible or other obligations claim me.

I garden in upstate New York’s Capital District, on a corner lot that occupies 2/3rds of an acre. I have been here 23 years and by now I have improved the original clay soil sufficiently so that I can grow a wide variety of plants that are adaptable to my climate. I suffer from Zone Envy from time to time, wanting that lovely zone 6 plant palette, but I have made my peace with my zone 5 site, and besides it is getting warmer.

My large garden is composed of several smaller gardens and I try to keep track of them by giving them memorable names. The oval garden that stretches along the back of the property in front of the line of blue spruces is called, for example, “the grim reaper garden.”   Its focal point is a weeping Norway spruce, gift of my dear friend Susan. Over the years I have trained this plant to grow up for 6’ before it starts to weep down. To me it most resembles a Hawaiian dancer, with arms out to the side and body slightly bent at the knees, moving gently from side to side. But Sara, my vegetable gardening partner, says it looks much more like the grim reaper with his scythe of doom. Her name has stuck.

Ironically, the pandemic with its protocol to shelter in place has given me the chance to be out in my garden on a daily basis for the first time since I moved to Columbine Drive and began to create my garden. For several years Perennial Wisdom, my small perennial garden design business, took up most of my week and my work as an Albany County Master Gardener took up the rest of it, leaving me only Saturday to be in my own garden.

Seeing my garden every day, I have begun to notice details missed before. The iris desperately need dividing. They present masses of upheaved roots, hard-packed from years of neglect and sparsely blooming as a result. A morning’s work has seen them dug up, cleaned off, divided, and replanted in better locations. The potentillas desperately need thinning. Who knew? Looking closely now, I see and do. I am actually on top of the thistles and the Japanese bittersweet, for now.

For me, then, there is a green lining to the prohibition on leaving home. Noticing has become my job. Yesterday, I took a good look at one of my columbines, flourishing in the front shade garden under the river birch. Did it need to be so beautiful, I wondered, to do its job of reproducing itself?  It seemed like a gift, the exquisite generosity of nature. Indeed, I could not help but wonder, what immortal hand or eye framed its gorgeous symmetry.

There is so much news to share. Stay tuned for more.

We strive for color in the garden, but perhaps we should think a bit more about the position and effects of different colors.  For example, yellow is considered to be the “happiness” color, the one that cheers you up when you are down.  If your spirits need a lift, surround yourself with yellow.  Yellow comes into its own in brighter and more intense light — later in the season, and later in the day, though nothing can match a yellow tulip or a yellow rose.  Mass Coreopsis, Helianthus, Rudbeckia for effect.  And mix with red and orange.

Then there is orange, almost my favorite color, the color of wild tiger lilies and my favorite Geums, the cultivar ‘Cookie.’  Orange is a stiumulant, exciting our emotions, increasing our desires for ever more color. Butterflies love it — think milkweed. In full sun at midday orange radiates joy.  Daylilies, cannas, blackberry lilies, kniphofia, troilius are my sources for orange.  I mix it with yellows and red in my full sun perennial garden.