Gardening already

Well it’s happened. I have had to garden.

We are from the American Midwest, where winter is properly winter. The ground freezes solid for months. One can stop gardening for something like 6-8 months of the year with no qualms whatsoever.

And then we moved here, to the Pacific Northwest. We came for the milder winters and summers, and we enjoy them mightily, but the cost is that there is no true dormant season in the garden at all. So I’m not growing crops in the winter? Well the weeds are still growing. Better get out there.

And so I’ve been out to deal with them for the first time this year.

When we first came here my husband did the comparisons and discovered that we have Cardiff winters and Majorca summers. Weeding, thankfully, stops in the summer because it’s so dry, though the effort to keep things watered is just as much. I had been keeping up with it, though, until last summer when we discovered that we have a sub-par well and that my gardens had grown to such an extent that the well really couldn’t keep up anymore. Not the way I had been doing things.

Fortunately, we had also been watching Gardener’s World for several years. Now now, wait: if you’re a British gardener I’m sure you have Things To Say about Gardener’s World, either good or critical, but please understand that we had both spent our lives in a completely different gardening environment. Total freezes in the winter, eliminating a lot of things that are perennials in milder climes, and boiling heat in the summer. It was great for growing tomatoes, okra, and melons, and absolute crap for growing all the familiar British crops like peas, potatoes, and lettuces, which do so very well in the Pacific Northwest. We didn’t know how to grow these things. We had to learn, and Gardener’s World taught us.

And it put me on to Beth Chatto, whose famous garden is in a dry area of England. In The Dry Garden she says that her area averages 22 inches of rain a year, and her goal is to water perennials for only one season to get them established, and then let them tough it out on their own.

You see how this appealed to me last summer, when I came to terms with the fact that my astilbes just weren’t going to make it.

I read her books, and also some Piet Oudolph books because his prairie-style plantings are also supposed to survive without watering. I made lists of the general kinds of plants I was looking for–to be watered for one season and maybe never again–and then I went to, and this will be controversial too, my local big-box-store’s garden center and I saw what they had.

People are critical of these generic, supposedly badly-thought-through garden centers, but having lived where I have I can make the broad observation that what’s sold here in the PNW is completely different from what’s sold in the Midwest, and that the centers therefore put some thought into what plants they sell people. The plants are at least somehow appropriate. And lo: mine did indeed sell a lot of drought-resistant perennials. Exactly what I needed.

In fact, going with what they provide is even more helpful than either Beth or Piet, because my areas are not exactly the same as theirs. People think of the PNW as a rainy place, and for three seasons it is, but in the summer it is absolutely normal to get no precipitation at all for 90 days. That’s unusual. My parents live in the American Southwest and they get more summer rain than we do.

So plants here have to be able to put up with that enormous, deserty-dry spell, but also to survive the sopping-wet winters. There are a lot of plants that can survive one or the other, but not so many that can do both, at least not without help.

So. This morning I went out to one of my gardens–the pretty one overlooked by the kitchen/dining sliding glass door and by the big picture windows in my bedroom–to pull dead foliage and hoe weeds and have a look at what the new, drought-resistant stuff had been doing. And it has been doing great. The upright euphorbias–which I’m scared of, but finally put on my big-girl pants and bought–have looked good nonstop, even through the early snow. The upright sedums are starting to grow. The shasta daisies are alive. The gaura is alive. The day lilies, I know because I already had some, will be alive. The only plants I’m not 100% sure of are the ornamental grasses, but it’s normal for those to not show growth until mid-spring.

This particular bit of garden went about six weeks with no water at all from me last summer, in between us doing a lot of traveling and me despairing over the well, and there are a lot of old things still alive, too, which impresses and annoys me in equal parts. The stupid acanthus, which never amounts to anything and which disappeared entirely last summer, is coming up. The hebe plant is blooming. The daphnes, surprisingly, are happy as clams, and my primroses are not completely dead.

So we’ll see how this summer goes. As a rule, the garden always gives me more than I deserve, but this summer anything that doesn‘t give will be promptly replaced. So there.