Get Growing with Mickey Rathbun: Time for a garden makeover: Seek help from professionals to see the big picture
Published: 09-13-2024 2:11 PM |
Late summer isn’t a pretty time in the garden, at least not in my garden. The recent mini-drought has bleached out what passes for lawn, several large hydrangeas are drooping as they beg me for water, the daylily borders are shriveled and brown. Hostas give new meaning to the phrase “slug fest.” But as I surveyed the perennial beds around my house, I realized that they’re suffering from more than seasonal distress. They need some serious wrangling to get them under control.
My husband has been urging me to get professional help. He calls it a “garden makeover.”
“It’s like a personal makeover,” he explains. “But you don’t need the makeover. Your garden does.” So far I’ve resisted that option.
There are many psychological hurdles for me to clear as I contemplate a garden makeover. For one thing, I’m overly attached to certain plants, either because someone I love gave them to me, or they cost way more than I could afford, or I’ve nursed them so long I can’t bear to relegate them to the compost pile. I’m also wary of change. The garden might look crummy, but I’m accustomed to it. I’m also a bit lazy. I tell myself I planted a certain bed just a few years ago (how many years, actually?) so it shouldn’t need overhauling yet. And I was raised by my mother to be a can-do person who never calls for help. Although she’s been dead for nearly 20 years, I can still hear her indignant voice in my ear: “You hired those people to do what?” But as my middle-age disappears in the rearview mirror, I am finally accepting, very reluctantly, my limitations, both physical and conceptual.
I decided to risk a consult. Last week I got in touch with my old friend Ellen Kaufman who, with her son Gordon, has a business called E & G Landscape Design. I had seen some of their work and liked their aesthetic. Just as important, I knew that they would be fun to work with. Ellen and Gordon stopped by the house the next day and we took a tour. “So, Mickey, what would you like us to do here?” was the first question. I hesitated, realizing that I had no idea what I wanted them to do. “A garden makeover, of course!” did not seem like an appropriate response.
If you ever want to feel humbled, invite a professional landscape designer to look at your garden. I led them past a shaggy row of spent daylilies and blackened daisies. Ugh. No comment. Next to this is a big thicket of goldenrod, bittersweet and multiflora rose that clings to the steep rock ledge that runs across the back of the yard. Could I even call this a garden? “This all needs to be cleared out,” I said despairingly. A person can be “house proud.” I was “garden shamed.”
A large outcropping of rock filigreed with dried moss and creeping ivy gave me my first clear idea. I gestured to the abundant rock around our property and said I’d like to expose as much of it as possible. Gordon and Ellen agreed that rock was a huge asset in a garden. “And you don’t have to water it or weed it,” I added.
Next on the tour was what I consider to be one of my more manicured perennial beds. At the moment, alas, it’s a free-for-all: black-eyed Susans and butterfly bushes are duking it out with garden phlox and cone flowers. The more timid inhabitants of the bed — campanula, drift roses, geraniums — have thrown in the towel. Despite its unruliness, it’s a riot of color that gives me and a host of pollinators much pleasure. “We’ll just leave that alone,” I said, wondering what Ellen and Gordon could possibly be thinking of my so-called garden.
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I proceeded quickly to the bed by the side of the house that my son Nicholas and I created in 2020, when he fled COVID-infested Brooklyn and returned home for a few months. Although we planned this bed with some care, a horde of opportunistic weeds has taken over vacant real estate. I don’t like to be an absentee landlord, but haven’t had the time or inclination recently to clean house. “I haven’t weeded much this summer,” I said, as if it wasn’t obvious. Of course, I wasn’t going to ask Ellen and Gordon to pull weeds. So what was it exactly that I wanted them to make over?
Finally, we arrived at the front of the property, visible through the large windows in the kitchen, where I spend a lot of time. This area is surrounded by rocks and tall trees, mainly hickories and maples. There’s a large semi-shaded swath at the back where I have slowly been clearing out nasty ground-crawling vines and replacing them with assorted stalwart perennials like Jacob’s ladder, hellebores and hostas, adding lamium and ajuga to fill in bare patches. This hodge-podge approach hasn’t yielded much coherence or harmony. Here, at last, was a problem I could ask Ellen and Gordon to address.
We agreed again that the rocky outcropping was our friend and that a few well-placed boulders might be a pleasing addition. Of course I’m not about to start lugging around boulders, but that would be someone else’s job. Noting the poor performance of the plants in certain places, Gordon explained that the soil was depleted and compacted and that a load of new soil would be the first order of business. They suggested that the large hydrangeas could stay in place and that some of the perennials could be removed and replanted. They would add more shade plants to create a felicitous whole. Their discussion was full of inspiring words like “unity” and “flow.”
On a lower level, more steep rock ledge offered the possibility of a rock garden to replace my unplanned, survival-of-the-fittest sprawl of random plants. “What about these ferns and iris?” asked Ellen. I stifled my knee-jerk response that I had to keep them because they came back faithfully every year. “They might be a bit out of scale here,” Ellen suggested tactfully.
Meanwhile, Gordon and my husband were looking askance at a curving mixed border of overgrown junipers, cotoneasters (leaf-catching horrors every fall), towering asters and baptisia that’s closest to the back of our single-story, mid-century modern house. This elongated bed grows along a low wall and is edged in front by a flat span of river rock inlaid with large, flat Goshen stones that runs to the base of the house. We agreed that this stone installation and the long, low façade of the house begged for more horizontal, Japanese-inflected plantings punctuated with splashes of color.
We shook hands and agreed to be in touch. It’s always helpful to talk with professionals who don’t carry the psychological baggage that makes it so difficult for me to see the bigger picture. And yet I’m still ambivalent about hiring other people to take control of my garden. I hear my mother’s voice loud and clear. I’m a gardener, after all, and it’s my garden out there. And so I waver. I’ll take the “before” picture, just in case.
Mickey Rathbun is an Amherst-based writer whose new book, “The Real Gatsby: George Gordon Moore, A Granddaughter’s Memoir,” has recently been published by White River Press.