Oh Good! The Lavender Died.

Yes - I actually heard myself saying that last week as I performed my annual spring ceremony. You know - the ones where you walk around and around the gardens with a box of plants in your hand, trying to figure out where you can cram another one in, and whether it will take a shoehorn to accomplish it.

My dilemma is much larger than usual this year. This is surprising, because last summer during the drought I blithely tossed out all of my indifferent plants so that they wouldn't compete with the ones I really liked for water. It turned out that I was indifferent to a huge number of plants, so that for the first time in years I had nice gaping holes to fill with new plants.

I hadn't counted on winning $300 worth of plants in a drawing at http://www.gardenreview.com when I reviewed a new hoe for them. I hadn't counted on my husband having an adult student in his public speaking class who owned a nursery told my husband to give him a list of plants we wanted, and we could have them at cost. My three page wish list had some pretty unusual plants on it (all the things I hadn't been able to find anywhere else), so I figured he'd have five or maybe six of those plants, if I was lucky. Turns out it's some gourmet nursery in upper New York State which carried almost everything. Two Jeep loads full.

I hadn't realized that sometimes companies send garden writers new plants to test in hopes that we will make mention of their catalog or web site. Nor did I expect the two huge boxes of plants that arrived from a garden company I'd been doing some consulting for, so that I'd have real experience with the plants we were dealing with.

Actually, I hadn't counted on having many new plants at all this spring. I ordered about 12 things from Etera. That's the sum total of all the plants I was actually expecting. Or at least the sum total I was actually prepared to plant, knowing exactly how they fit into the scheme of things.

So here I was, wandering around the yard, arms full of little potted plants, wondering what on earth possessed me take my $300 prize in assorted colors of heaths and heathers. I know I said I wanted to plant more in drifts that I had been doing - but 50 little heather plants are more like a tidal wave. And every time I thought I had a place for them I'd start to carefully dig, only to find something I planted last week already occupying the spot -or something still dormant and slumbering beneath the soil.

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