This might have worked well, except that I forgot several things -- things I didn't even realize should be part of a gardener's planning homework. I'm not talking about essentials like proper soil preparation here. Your soil prep should already be done before you start even thinking of ordering and planting. But, since the catalogs are in front of you now, and the nurseries will soon be setting out their wares, this is a guidance lesson in getting the plants right.
I got my first plants wrong. I had never actually seen most of them blooming. This is tough to do when catalog-browsing in February, but from now on I don't order it unless I've actually seen it growing. (Well -- usually I don't. . . Sometimes it's hard to resist.) For that first garden, I looked carefully at photos in catalogs and books, so I thought I knew what I'd be getting. But photos can lie. Just today, for instance, I was admiring what looked like large, icy blue clematis blossoms in the Select Seeds catalog. It was really borage -- and borage blossoms are not huge at all. Often, miniscule flowers are magnified in catalogs to show detail. They don't, unfortunately, magnify in the garden. I ended up with far too many flowers that were barely there. Not a good way to create drifts of color. The larger error was in not thinking about leaves. I was planting a flower garden, wasn't I? Who cares about foliage?
I do -- now that I'm a poorer but wiser gardener. Plants don't flower every day of the growing season. Most of the season, what you see is the foliage -- so it has to be something worth looking at. Look at that foliage -- really hard. Learn to recognize it so that you don't mistake it for a weed and pull it the following spring.
| Here's the follow-up discussion on this article: | View all related messages |
For a complete listing of article comments, questions, and other discussions related to Carol Wallace's Virtual Gardening topic, please visit the Discussions page.