Gardening - an Attitude Adjustments -Part 2

With some plants, like the dahlias, it may be easier on you to take cuttings and spend a winter happily rooting and tending to these. It will also help you to pass the time until spring.

But take a mental journey through your garden right now. I'm betting there are many plants there that you take for granted. Plants that fill their allotted space without fuss. Plants that are so undemanding, and that thrive with so few demands that we practically forget they are there. These are the real workhorses of the garden - and the kinds of plants we need to learn to really love if we want to keep on enjoying the act of gardening.

Consider native plants. Many of us react to that term with vague uneasiness.

"Aren't those the things that grow by the roadside and in ditches?"

Yes - and they would grow in our lawns as well, except that we mow them so the baby plants never mature to the point where we recognize them. But planted in a garden, in bright masses and drifts, they can look every bit as pleasing and even elegant as the fussy hybrids that we pamper and fret over.

Learning to love plants that are easy to grow requires not just an attitude adjustment for those who tend to pride themselves on successfully growing exotics. It also requires a visual readjustments.

A new style of dress, or car, can look odd to us at first. But then suddenly we become so accustomed to it that it looks right, and the styles that they replace start to look dated and unattractive after a time. Some of us may remember a time when rooms decorated in avocado and harvest gold were considered to be the height of style. Now those same colors provoke shudders. They are no longer a part of our visual vocabulary.

Our eyes can as easily learn to prefer a garden full of ornamental grasses and drifts of echinacea and other native plants to one packed with plants that demand pampering, once the native plants become a part of our gardening vocabulary.

And consider replacing some areas of the garden with easy to maintain shrubs. Dwarf conifers can be extremely undemanding. They can also be beautiful, coming in all shapes and sizes, from the quite formal looking globe arborvitae to the almost eccentric and quite picturesque weeping blue cedars, And they

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