exuberant vs. overgrown

Before.


After.

In my garden, there is a fine line between exuberant and overgrown. As I was away on vacation, my garden went way over the line into unkempt. If my neighbors didn’t know that I was away, they might have thought that my house was abandoned or worse. Spent blooms and seed stalks were everywhere, plants had overgrown paths, and the artemesia and ‘Helen Von Stein’ lamb’s ears had bolted. What was an interesting and orderly combination of forms and textures had degraded in just over a week, into a riot. Who knew that spurge grew that quickly? Somehow the automatic watering system had failed and there had been no rain during my absence, whereas the monsoons were occuring when I left.

Unfortunately, I returned from Europe with the flu and all I could manage was to barely lift my head off the sofa and remember those glorious borders in Scotland and see how dramatically they differed from what I had (of course they have full-time gardeners to dead-head and tidy, but I ignored that fact). Today was the first day that I was able to stand upright for any time, and one of the first things I had to do was to do something about the garden.

Now there’s two things that can be done when the garden has gotten out of hands (well, three, if you count ignoring it). One option is to get out the Felco #8’s and do some cutting back and deadheading. That’s my first option and all I had energy for today. Another option is to break out the shovel. I usually wait for fall or spring to do this, since at this time of year, transplanting is not an option (the heat will kill anything not established, unless I am very careful about watering - not too much, not too little, cutting back, and shading). We are talking removal. I prune back to keep things under control until then.

Once things were trimmed back, I felt much better. Things were back into some sort of balance. The artemesia was given back some form and I had caught it before the allergen producing flowers had opened. The deadheading was accomplished (except for the ones I am saving for seed). The nepeta was pruned back. The stachys was made orderly.

Now it can be said that sometimes I am a bit too orderly. Sometimes I catch myself looking at a plant in full bloom (especially my orchids), and thinking, almost simultaneously as appreciating the flowers, that I can’t wait to trim off the flowers and deal with the dividing and repotting, or whatever else needs to be done, but can’t be done because the plant is in bloom. How sick is that? That’s the good thing about the plants I grow primarily for foliage, I suppose.

There are some people who have mastered the art of the casual garden. Their plants go to seed, they get sprawly and flop untidily, plants randomly die, leaves turn brown, fallen flowers remain unswept, and still their garden looks charmingly relaxed. They have mastered the art of Wabi-Sabi, the Japanese philosophy of finding the perfect in the imperfect. I am clearly not one of these people. Maybe one day.