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Love That Toad!

© Emily Levitt

The shapes of garden beds are easy to see when they sit empty on gray winter days. When I can't get out and work the soil, I find other ways to play, in the garden of my imagination.

Pulling out photos of last summers' efforts at design in my little yard gives me both inspiration and dismay, as I leaf through them. Some things looked just grand; others not so grand. I tell myself that photographing green material is very difficult, which is true. I also tell myself that if I just try harder, my garden will always look like a magazine. This is NOT true; this is delusional thinking. Still, I pore over my pictures and compare them to the glossy ones in the catalogs.

I probably wouldn't bother to go to all the trouble of looking over these things if it weren't for the arrival of new plant material in these catalogs, and on line. I only have so much room in my garden, and if something I planted didn't make it through the summer, I really should remove it, and replace it with a specimen that really fires my rocket. But, I delude myself into thinking that more effort will equal success. Sometimes, it takes me a while to figure out that the Lord is telling me not to try something in my garden again.

A case in point: I've tried polemonieum
(Jacob's Ladder) six times in as many summers, because I love it, and I want it REAL bad. I've spent money on 'Brise d'Anjou', and borrowed hunks of the generic specimen from friends. No luck. This picture of the lovely, fern-like foliage of 'Brise' comes from Budds' Garden. I've never had it live long enough to get a good picture.

I'm obviously wasting my time with this stuff.

In the same area, I have native and arborvitae ferns, and a profusion of self-sowing toad liles. Rather than make myself miserable for another year, do you think maybe I should try some more toad lilies?

Am I a rocket scientist, or what?

Bearing this simple concept in mind, I went cruising through the internet slide show at Terra Nova Nursery. Please do likewise; you will never think of trycirtis in the same way again. Plain green foliage and small bloom sizes have kept me from running out to get more toad lilies in the past, but I now have several

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