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On the Road Again

© Mary Henry

I can hear Willy Nelson singing it in my head as I prepare for another road trip. I know gardeners who would just as soon never leave their gardens in summer even to go on vacation, but I am not one of them. I love to travel, especially in the car. Though I can get as numb in the lower spine as anyone else after a long day, I'm always alert for the appearance of the next garden center around the bend. Fortunately too, I travel with someone who is as addled as I am in this respect. We never pass a garden center. We will even exit an Interstate and go back to see one we had to pass due to the limited access roadway. I'm sure that this habit would qualify us for the "You know you are a garden nut when..." award.

In addition to garden centers, we stop for anything interesting along the road that one of us doesn't recognize. Usually it is a flowering plant, but sometimes it is an exceptional garden. It may be glorious or tacky, but a choice example of its kind either way. We like to tour and appreciate civic plantings too, especially in tiny towns where you know there is little budget for such things.

The record of this madness is a dogeared Road Atlas with all manner of markings on its pages. We mark where we have stopped and make notes wherever there is room. In the case of exceptional plants we have seen we note the mile marker (if there were any) and the date. I could tell you where you can see Turk's cap lilies and wild orchids in roadside ditches and a circle around one mark shows where we snipped the sample that later proved to be a willow cone gall. I probably would never have called for a stop on that one had they not looked like pink roses on a willow tree from the road.

I used to collect propagating material along the roadsides when I had my own growing business, but I rarely do it anymore because the little space that I have rarely matches the environmental niches along public highways. It felt a lot like plant amnesty to rescue seed pods and cuttings from plants that were routinely mowed off by state or county road crews. I once split my scalp with my favorite perennial tool (It looks like a hoe on one side and a hatchet on the other) while trying to dig a piece of cow parsnip out of a ditch in Iowa. As I returned to the car triumphantly bearing my prize, my companion took one look at my sweaty face and asked worriedly why there was blood running down my forehead. I hadn't even noticed I had done it. ("You know you're a plant nut when...")

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