Serendipity in the Garden - Not Just in Springtime.

The reason most of us think of spring as such an exciting time in the garden is because we can almost guarantee that every day when we go out and inspect, there will be new things to see.

I've had a spring-like feeling the past couple of weeks because I just put in a lot of new plants - not from nursery pots but the kind where you open a package full of roots and plant them and hope they sprout. So every day when I go inspecting I see new life - the first tiny tips of the crocosmia, the fern-like leaves of astilbes and all kinds of hostas, Siberian iris and more. The start of the woodland garden I've been working on this summer.

But it occurs to me that there are new things to be seen in almost any garden from day to day. And so today I took a special inventory of all the new things I discovered - as well as a few that I may have discovered while preoccupied and am now taking the time to marvel over. It's a revealing sort of exercise that we all need to take the time to indulge in more often.

I always start my walk by walking along the edge of the new woodland garden. A few of the astilbes I just planted must think they belong to the bamboo family because I swear I can measure the new growth each day. And I see that two buddleia have volunteered to grow at the woodland edge. This isn't exactly a new discovery - I knew there was a buddleia there - in the singular, or so I thought. But either I have two buddleias sharing the same planting hole or I have one that is blooming in two colors.

That is not as astonishing as my discovery that the foxgloves I put in this spring have grown so huge that I didn't even realize that I still had one unplanted rhododendron sitting there in its pot. The foxglove foliage is so lush that the pot is invisible. And here I thought I had finally accomplished the impossible - getting all the plants into the ground!

That woodland garden is also developing an attitude. I was careful about the placement of the rhodos and hostas, trying to create a specific double path that has two entrances at the top of the slope, converging into a single path as it goes deeper into the wooded area. Some of the plants simply sulked when I planted them - and in the process of finding them places that they are happier in, it became clear that the path wanted to go a certain way - no matter what I had planned for it. And if your garden speaks (as with E.F. Hutton) it pays to listen.

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