Dirt By Amy Stewart

The Garden Coach, Part One

I blog with a group of opinionated gardeners at gardenrant.com; one of my partners in crime on that site makes her living as a garden coach.  At first I wasn't sure why the world needed one more kind of horticultural professional.  We already have designers, landscape architects, arborists, engineers, lawn care services, and landscape crews to choose from. But Susan’s stories about her fledgling garden coach career fascinated me. A movie star who spends most of his time in New York asked her to go to his mother's house in the DC area a couple times a month and just garden alongside her, to encourage her interest in the outdoors and to help with the heavy lifting. Gardeners who had spent years filling their yard with plants felt frustrated with the results and called on Susan to help them rearrange and fine-tune.

Pretty soon the media was calling too, and Susan was talking to reporters all over the country about garden coaching.  She didn't invent the concept, but she just happened to have a website (thegardeningcoach.com) that attracted reporters.  One day I was reading about Susan in the Christian Science Monitor, and there was a quote from Genevieve Schmidt, a garden coach in Arcata. I had met Genevieve a couple of times—she created a lovely woodland garden for a friend of mine -- so I invited her over to talk about why, exactly, a gardener might want to hire a coach.

Some Thoughts on the Weather

At last, the winter solstice will be over and the days will be getting gradually and imperceptibly longer. That's fine with me: having a few minutes of daylight and a few degrees of warmth snatched away from me day by day has left me feeling irritated and impoverished. I should be in tune with the season, but I’m not. I have not surrendered to the darkness, I have not found stark beauty in bare branches and frost on the windows, and I have not rediscovered the joys of a crackling fire and a cup of hot chocolate. It just didn’t happen for me this year.

A little over a month ago I was in Miami, drinking mojitos on the beach after midnight. I had brought along a sweater, which is the sort of silly superfluous thing that people from Northern California do when they visit a beach. We simply can't hold the idea of a reliably warm, tropical coastline in our minds long enough to leave a sweater at home. New Yorkers shed their overcoats at the Miami airport with the confidence of someone who knows how to trade in a cold place for a warm one, but not Californians. We cling to the idea that any ocean could turn cold and unfriendly; we come prepared.

My Overcrowded Garden

Something has changed about my garden this year. It’s reached a kind of critical mass, finally. It’s matured. Most of the perennials have been in the ground long enough to reach their full size, and some, like the two dozen lavender I planted when I moved in, are now old and woody and ready to be pulled out.

I stood in the garden this afternoon, thinking over the fates of those lavender plants, and I suddenly realized that in a few more months, this will officially be the garden I’ve had longer than any other. How did that happen? I still think of this as being my new garden, the one I filled with plants from my old garden. But it’s not so new anymore. It’s full grown—and it’s also full.

Gardens have a way of marking the passage of time in sudden, surprising ways (how did that tree we planted get to be taller than the house?) and mine is no exception. A sturdy, yellow-flowered phlomis I planted a few years ago has sprawled entirely out of bounds, burying a couple of interesting and unusual salvia in the process. The salvia in turn have buried some Oriental poppies. The Oriental poppies have squashed a—well, you get the idea. I’m out of room, but I can’t stand to throw anything away, and I can’t stop buying more plants. Last time I reached this point in a garden, I moved. But I’m not moving this time, so what do I do?

Meet the Haggards

  Pete Haggard didn’t take a vacation for ten years. Why? There was no one to watch the bugs.

    Haggard, a Humboldt County agricultural inspector, began photographing and cataloging northern California insects over a decade ago. The result is a new book from Timber Press, Insects of the Pacific Northwest, which he co-authored with his wife Judy, a wildlife biologist. Often, the only way to get the pictures he wanted was to raise them himself.    

“For about ten years,” he said, “I’d go out on Saturday mornings and take pictures of the insects I found. But it’s hard to find them in their immature stages, so I’d look for the host plants and gather eggs, then bring them back and raise them in the house in five-gallon buckets.”    

Maintaining an insect nursery is a complicated endeavor. “It’s not like a dog or a cat,” he said. “You can’t leave a hundred different insects with somebody and go away. They’re like babies; they have to be cleaned every day, they need fresh foliage, and you have to check them twice a day to see if they’ve hatched.” Moths and butterflies in particular are tricky; if they emerge, they need to be released or they will beat themselves against the glass. “You can’t get a good picture after even a day or two,” Pete said, “because they start losing scales that quickly.”

Blueberry season!

I got into blueberries in a big way recently. One or two shrubs hardly seemed worth the trouble, so I came home with six plants and a commitment to buy more if I could find room for them. I’ve been trying to fill one long border with culinary plants—herbs, fruit, artichokes, kale, anything edible—so blueberries fit with the theme and they were the right height for an empty spot I couldn’t figure out what to do with. Also, blueberries can tolerate a little shade, and the place I’d chosen for them gets morning shade most of the year.

This is a good time to plant blueberries, and they’re available right now at all the nurseries and will be through bareroot planting season, which ends around February when the spring plants start to show up. The shrubs look good all year long, and in the fall, many varieties produce gorgeous red foliage. Just remember to pay attention to their special needs, such as:

Rain Gear

If you’re not a gardener, you might think that gardening is mostly about the plants: what to plant, where to plant it, what to feed it, when to prune it. While it’s true that gardeners are deeply involved with the lives of their plants, let’s not overlook another critical—and often exasperating—aspect of a gardener’s life: the gear.

I won’t even get started on tools with wooden handles that break after a week, rakes whose tines get tangled in whatever you’re raking and fall off, and pruning shears with badly-designed grips that slip out of your hands. No, winter is on the way, and all I care about this time of year are boots and gloves.

If I were a gardening glove, I would not ever want to end up in my garden. I would cower and tremble on the sales rack, hoping against hope that I was the wrong color or the wrong size or too expensive or too cheap to be chosen. And if I did have the misfortune to actually be purchased and brought home, I would hide. Hide in the closet, behind the fertilizer and the pruning shears. Hide among the weeds and hope to get left outside. I’d take any desperate act my little gardening glove brain could conceive of.

At the Center for Urban Horticulture, Seattle

At the Center for Urban Horticulture, Seattle

The Garden Blogger Challenge

During the month of October, GardenRant is participating in the DonorsChoose Blogger Challenge.  Here's how it works:  teachers choose projects they want funded, bloggers pick projects they want to support, and challenge their readers to  make donations.   GardenRant has chosen a bunch of school garden projects and is encouraging other garden bloggers to join in. The idea is that by having one mega-garden-blogger challenge, garden bloggers can send a big message about how much gardening matters. 

So if you'd like to make a donation, go here to see the GardenRant Global Garden Blogger Challenge and choose the project you'd like to support.  And if you have a garden blog or website (or, for that matter, actual friends in the real world), you can post a link on your own blog to the GardenRant challenge, or e-mail it to your friends.

Spread the word--you dig?

Damn Fine Dahlias

Every year these dahlias come up and I think, "What was I doing, planting these boring pinkish-white dahlias in a garden that's supposed to be all orange and red and purple?"  In fact, they were probably mislabeled, because I have never been a pale pink kind of gal. 

But then enough of them bloom at once that I can cut five or six and do this with them.  Damn.

And so, having earned their keep for another year, they're allowed to live.  So what if they don't match the rest of the garden?  Color schemes are overrated, anyway.