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Category: Perennial gardening | Posted: Wed Aug 17, 2011 3:34 am

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Gardens are ever changing enterprises. To garden is to attempt to put our own personal stamp on one small section of this earth. Nature however has her own ideas. Just when a gardener has a section of his plot looking perfectly, the next year, it has, of course, changed. One perennial threatens to take over another; one plant dies out; another refuses to bloom; others pop up as volunteers which most of us are too kind hearted to eliminate. (How can you pull up a volunteer before you see it bloom?) And so the garden morphs gradually over time according to its own design.

The plants themselves contribute to this; they do appear to have their own agendas. A self-sowing rudbeckia has been travelling through my garden, marching from the back of the meadow garden right out the front and now down in the lawn and across the rail fence into the shade garden. Then there's that wildling campanula, very pretty, that actively resists being corralled. Whenever I try to contain it, it dies out in that spot. Luckily it resides in several places and I have learned my lesson. And what about those plants that just show up mysteriously in the garden? I have a Lysimachia clethroides (Gooseneck loosestrife) that must have piggybacked its way in on another plant. The lysimachia I can understand. It can reproduce from just a section of its fleshy root. What I can't understand is the sedum (perhaps 'Autumn Joy'?) that has similarly just appeared. A dropped leaf that rooted itself? Dropped from the sky by a bird? How does this happen? However it came, I am the fortunate beneficiary.

Of course nature does have some good ideas. The fortuitous self-sowed penstemon next to the stokes aster was not a combination I had thought of, but a grand one nevertheless. And when the rudbeckia sowed itself next to the bright red daylily with the golden throat, oh what a glorious sight! And so I attempt to accommodate myself to the whims of my garden and simply be grateful for its willfulness.
It helps that I lose track of how my garden appeared just two or three years ago. It allows me the self deception that these changes were after all, my idea.



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Frank wrote on Fri Aug 19, 2011 11:01 pm:

You have to admit, it makes things a heck of a lot more exciting :)

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Miss Liberty wrote on Sun Aug 28, 2011 2:23 am:

I thoroughly enjoyed reading your blog entry. I haven't ever worked with perennials (it's our first summer in the house) but I can see, from what you write, that there is both a challenge and reward in doing so.

"To garden is to attempt to put our own personal stamp on one small section of this earth." That's a wonderful perspective.

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Cayuga Morning wrote on Sun Aug 28, 2011 2:37 am:

Frank--yes, it is part of the challenge of gardening.
Ms. Liberty-Thanks! I wish you well in your landscaping/veggie gardening at your new home.

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SongofJoy57 wrote on Sat Sep 17, 2011 10:02 am:

I thoroughly enjoy your blog entries. Although there are no physical pictures . . . the manner in which you write has me seeing your garden world in my mind's eye! Sounds ever-so-lovely.

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Cayuga Morning wrote on Sat Sep 17, 2011 10:21 am:

Thanks Song!

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