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Millennial Gardening

© Mary Henry

If the calendar were set up by the standards of gardening and its ancestor, farming, we would probably be starting the tenth millennium and no one would care to argue whether it begins this Jan. 1 or next. However, it does serve to make us think about the past as we mark the milestone, and my thoughts have gone back a lot farther than my last growing season because of it. When you look at gardening from the perspective of a thousand years, it is mind-boggling. At that point, the challenge of subsistence was still so great that ornamental gardening was a luxury not even considered by anyone other than the very rich and powerful. Even monastery gardens were beautiful only as a by-product of their usefulness. You and I would be much more interested in the potato harvest or whether there would be enough hay for the livestock to get through a long, cold northern winter. Who can eat petunias? Hurrah for the Good NEW Days!

After that humbling experience, I considered the differences in the last 100 years and that, too, is amazing. Cottage gardening was alive and well among ordinary folk and the Victorians had brought plants into the northern indoor landscape by the development of steam heat and cheap glass. However, the plants were still mostly selections from the wild species and gardening equipment and techniques were borrowed from farming. Contrast that with what we consider normal and commonplace today.

My garden would be a totally different place if I had to do it with what was available to gardeners of that day. I don't have a lot of space. My house, garage and parking pad take up almost half of the roughly 10,000 square feet of my small urban lot. When you take out the patio, sidewalks, paths, and grudgingly kept lawn areas, there is very little left to garden in and all of that is in some degree of shade. Much of that shade is created by mature trees that suck the moisture out of the sandy soil. I make up for this by using techniques, equipment and plants that were not available in 1900. Much of my garden is in containers in places where I can't garden in the ground.

Today we have containers made of materials that became available only a few short years ago. They come in many sizes, shapes, colors and textures and even the largest can be lightweight enough to handle easily (before they are filled and watered!). I use them in many places in the yard where little else will grow without great effort on my part. At one rear corner of the house where a 60 foot arborvitae shades and starves the ground, I have a collection of faux terracotta containers of varying heights that spill with greenery, shade-loving bedding annuals and tropical species that are winter houseplants. The other corner, having no balancing tree, but most of the area's sparse sun has another collection of planters. This group is larger, taller and more varied for balance. It also gives me greater range with the plants used. More planters are arranged at the bases of trees, for variation and height in flower borders and marking every transition from alley to yard, from my yard to the neighbors', from backyard to the front. There are some on the patio, the porch, the steps, the railings. Real terracotta cannot safely be left outside here. The freezing and thawing would ruin it either quickly or over time. Even dense concrete is not forever here. That makes taking the containers in mandatory. I'm so glad they are plastic now.