What expectations do you have of your garden? Your goal should be to create a cohesive and vigorously flourishing plant picture — a doable creation with plants that know their place and don’t roam uncontrollably.
The plants you choose to adopt say a lot about you. Some “safe” gardeners rely mostly on annuals. As you become more of a connoisseur, you branch out into multi-colored foliage, unique textures and shapes. Foliage’s own merit comes first, flowers are a bonus.
Review your own color preference. If you thrive on an energetic red/yellow flower combination, advance to a red/orange grouping and immediately create more excitement. If you are a retiring type, soft white and ivory colors combined with shimmering green foliage could be intriguing.
Bring light into your garden with variegated plants such as cream-edged hosta, painted dogwood and streaked tulips in the spring. Plant gracefully arching striped grasses like hakonecloa or carex to provide a refined focal point in summer and add as a companion silvery green-edged hibiscus. Consult your catalogues, look for bright personalities and get inspired. Foliage holds the garden together and foliage color provides the essential spark. Sometimes variegated plants and shrubs may revert and put out new shoots that are solid green. Remove those right away because the more vigorous solid colored shoots will overpower the variegation.
Autumn color is a benefit to seek out. Find plant partners and shift and regroup until you have found the artfully right combination. Space counts more than ever before, and every plant has to earn its keep. Select plants that give you a thrill instead of just filling up space or providing color. It’s important to lead the eye and even more important not to disappoint.
There is a new plant in my life, phormium tenax variegatum (New Zealand flax) growing to 10 feet, frost-hardy and grown for spectacular foliage. However, you might have a little problem in finding it — it’s definitely not a common plant in New Jersey. Look it up online; it will inspire you. Native plant lovers, forgive me this trespass.
One of the lessons that we gardeners learn is humility. We always have to deal with nature’s capriciousness and temper tantrums. If you have boasted to your friends about the glory of your garden, make sure they visit very soon, blooms fade away so quickly.
A great tool to help you decipher your garden performance is to take digital pictures every two or three weeks from spring to fall. The pictures will tell you when and where you need to restrain vigorous plants, add or remove some and plant for interest and contrast. Then, on a rainy day, sit down, evaluate and plan your tactic for the coming years. And when dreams collide with reality, don’t let your garden become a battleground.
Water is a precious commodity, so be water smart in your garden! Use an organic mulch to keep roots moist and cool and water deeply to strengthen root growth. Water in the morning before moisture evaporates. Reuse household water as much as possible and put up a rain gauge to help manage your water needs.
To keep flowers blooming and vegetable gardens producing, apply foliar feeding (10- 8-8) or fish emulsion now. This is a fast and easy way to get nutrients to the plant, increasing flowers and yield.
New Jersey’s state flower is the violet, an industrial-strength producer. I have them spreading in quiet contagion now, behaving very badly, filling in brick walks, nooks and crannies everywhere. I love violets in spring, but now they are totally out of control. To bring in some resemblance of order, I resorted to weed control and applied it selectively two days ago with great result. At least I know that the violet avalanche has been stopped.
“Here in the glad September, when all the woods are red and gold, and hearts remember the long days that are dead.”
William W. Campbell
Gotti Kelley is past president of the Navesink Garden Club and on the board of the Garden Club of New Jersey.