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Gardening is described as a lifestyle rather than aa a hobby because, in season, gardening consumes your whole life!
The project can be especially daunting if you've inherited a previous owner's gardening mistakes. People have different tastes and different levels of gardening knowledge and often living with someone else's garden design is impossible. When we moved into our new home, the good news was that the previous owners had put in various garden beds which they had filled with plants; the bad news was that they didn't do them properly. For instance, they erected a huge trellised arbor which they planted with grape vines and espaliered fruit trees, but they didn't bother to cement in any of the posts, or properly dig the bed, so I've spent hours digging the bed and cutting sod away from the plants, and am working up to digging out the posts and properly embedding them, as I can't stand the way they're all leaning. I've been working on the yard ever since we've moved in, and there's no end in sight. If the problem is simply a plant or two that's suffering because it's in the wrong place, the solution is simple enough. All you need to do is find out what conditions the misplaced beauty needs, and amend its site accordingly or move it to a better location. If the problem plant is a tree, The National Arbor Day Foundation has two very useful articles, "9 Things You Should Know About Trees" and "What Tree is That?" My own article, "How Not to Choose a Tree" contains more information and links on tree selection and planting.If you're not sure where to move a particular plant because you don't know what conditions it prefers, GardenGuides is an excellent source of plant information. Click on the flowers, vegetables, or herbs GardenGuides near the top of the page to access info-sheets on many plants. Sometimes even this becomes complicated because you have to plan and create a new bed. Then you have to decide if this much work is worth it, just to save an individual plant or two, or whether it's better (for your health, family relationships, or energy level) to just give the sad specimens away to a hopefully better home. Thanks to the previous owners, it's a rare year where I don't give away almost as many plants as I put in. They had a marvellous disregard for any plant's mature size. In one small 8 x 8 bed, for example, they had a thirty foot maple tree, an angelica (which gets 12 feet tall), an euonymous bush (about 8 by 5 feet at maturity), about a dozen herbs, including lavender, feverfew and sage, three achillea, a clematis (which grows to 12 to15 by 3 feet), a collection of lilies, and a photinia (mature size about 12 by 5 feet)! So far I've given away the photinia, angelica, and sage, cut down the maple tree (because it died), severely pruned the euonymous, and moved all the lavender and achillea out to other beds. And it's still crowded!
The copyright of the article Inherited Garden Problems in Gardening in B.C. is owned by . Permission to republish Inherited Garden Problems in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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