GET GROWING!

CREATING GARDENING SPACE WHERE SEEMINGLY NONE EXISTS

Rose campion (white) and cupid’s dart (blue) come into their own when the indigo they are squeezed in under has done it’s thing.

By LADYBUG

This time of year, each year, I am tempted by the gorgeous blooms in flower baskets that are displayed at pop-up locations outside most grocery stores.

I pick up a basket or two, while I wait for the gardening season to kick into full gear, for the nurseries to display their ware – old favourites as well as new cultivars.

Then each year, like I didn’t know it would happen, the temperatures dip and I bring the poor baskets indoors, keeping them safe and warm until it is safe to place them outside again.

I wrote about this yearly ritual to a friend in warm and sunny Bangalore.

While she commiserated over the flower baskets, she said her attention was caught by the line about waiting to pick up plants at my favourite nursery.

“You must be a magician in space management,” she wrote. “I’ve seen your garden, remember? Every inch and millimetre of soil of the beds was choked with assorted plants, beautifully designed though the whole garden was.

“Yet every summer you tell me about buying loads of new plants and how well they are doing. How? Don’t they have to fight for soil space to put their roots in, as well as for nutrition? Oh, I understand your gardener’s greed very well. I am just bemused by the mechanics of it! All plants, old and new, doing well?”

So of course, not one to miss an opportunity to discuss my garden, I had to explain my space management process!

“All I will take credit for is having learned to exercise some form of discipline,” I responded.

In our earlier garden, I would happily bring home new plants, accept plant cuttings and divisions from friends, divide my own growing clumps of perennials and then plunk them somewhere or the other in the yard. Basically, my garden grew in a series of extending existing beds or a join-the-dots system of digging holes and eventually connecting a few plantings into yet another bed.

A scabiosa and a dianthus make room for one another.

Over the years, it grew into a somewhat chaotic space that only my gardener’s heart could love.

I was debating digging everything up in one massive reorganizing when we decided to move.

Presented with a brand new, clean slate in our new yard, I was determined to keep my grab-every-plant tendency in check. We got a landscape company to create beds in the front and back yard, edge them with stones and then I filled them with my favourite plants.

With a growing realization that I can’t maintain an ever-burgeoning garden, and that the existing beds are also often hard to maintain in decent shape, I now make room for new plants in the existing beds. No more spontaneous new beds for me! To do this, I use every trick I’ve learned over the years.

I plant shade-loving plants under trees or taller plants, or train vines up trunks of trees that will be done flowering by the time the vine blooms – clematis on the magnolia, for instance.

I cut back early blooming ones like iris to provide a little more room for new ones that I tuck around. I thin full ones like indigo after they’re done blooming to let cupid’s dart planted below shine.

I dig up large clumps, divide them into smaller ones, plant some and give the others away.

I used to ask friends and neighbours if they wanted daisies or iris or whatever it was that needed a new home. Until my husband said I was in danger of becoming known as the lady who lay in wait for unwary neighbours walking by, pouncing on them with offers of this plant or that. So now I leave the offerings from my garden by the curb with a sign asking people to please take them!

Earlier, I used to actually print out descriptions of the plants but stopped doing that a couple of years ago. Whoever wants to pick up free plants can use the google lens on their phones to figure out which plant is which or ask me if they spot me in the front yard!

And guess what? Contrary to what my husband predicted, neighbours who’ve become friends now come by to ask if I have “any more plant babies that need a new home”!

Or actually place an order “for that white phlox if you’re going to divide it”.

And thus our gardens grow!