This is another re-post to tie in with the Gardening write-off. There are a few more to come. I hope you enjoy them.
I have some friends who live among the kettle moraines of southeastern Wisconsin (for those who don’t know what those are, they are the large hills and valleys left by the glaciers when they retreated). That’s all I’m getting into about that, I’m no geologist. The house is perched on the top of one of these large hills and they are protected from any up-close development by having had the foresight to purchase the surrounding 20 acres and planting lots of pine trees and Weeping Willows. The property has wonderful views, a wooded area and a small lake. Some of the land is rented out to a farmer.
One fall day when I was there a few years ago, I spotted Taunton’s Fine Gardening magazine in a pile of things on the kitchen counter and asked if I could take some issues home to read. I was particularly interested in the cover story, as it dealt with “Making the Most of a Shady Site.” The article, written by Inta Krombolz, is subtitled “Turn obstacles into advantages in damp garden areas.”
I have a good bit of that between my building and the one directly to the south. It gets two hours of direct sun in the morning and a few hours on the late afternoon. The rest of the day there is nothing but reflected light and things do grow well there, judging by the amount of weeds I have had to pull out. After this last bout of above average weather, followed by some healthy April rains, my garden has exploded with greenery.
I want more variety, and this article gave me a good selection of bulbs, grasses, ferns and perennials that will do well in this situation. Right now the only things that seem to grow well there are day lilies, columbine, ferns, hostas and bleeding hearts. I usually add lots of white impatiens and white begonias from the local green market, which have done great. I even got a few giant nicoteana plants to mature and flower.
My garden won’t be as beautiful as Ms. Krombolz, who reminds me that the most important maintenance work is “a good fall cleanup, as the combination of dampness and leaf cover” (they sure do drift in) “can lead to crown rot, fungus and mildew problems.” I will have more work this spring when I apply a few 50-pound bags of Milorganite a fertilizer manufactured by our own Milwaukee Sanitation Department. It’s concocted from all the goodies from our water purification plant and it keeps Milwaukee’s golf courses (and my garden) green and growing.
This fine magazine has all sorts of goodies, ads and interesting articles for everyone from the beginner (me) to the advanced gardener. The sections include Ornamental Plants, Garden Design, Gardening Technique” and Landscaping. Within these sections to will find topics that range from “The Sweet Sent of Jasmine” to Plant a Prairie Garden” to “Turn Summer Cuttings Into Shrubs” and “Transforming a Barren Backyard.”
Departments include Over the Fence, a letters section with questions from readers and (sometimes) answers. Tips has everything from “how to” tips like “Creating a Garden Path With a Plywood Jig,” to using fishing line for window box climbers and using ice cubes to water hanging baskets. In Gardening Architecture you can learn everything from how to build a greenhouse to making trelliswork to dress up your garden and support your plants.
In The Working Garden, one particular article showed how to grow plants indoors (all winter long) under a “400-watt, high-intensity-discharge lighting unit.” I got my building manager talked putting up grow lights. He likes to save the half-dead plants that people leave behind when they move out. Well, actually he likes me to do it so he can take the credit. I get to enjoy them and watch them recover so I could care less about his motives. In warmer weather they live outside my living room window and do wonders in making the shade garden look almost tropical.
All this is followed in quick marching order by Praiseworthy Plants, Reviews, Garden Gear, Basics, Container Gardening, Q&A, an Advertiser Index and Web Directory and The Last Word, which in the three issues I have, has op-ed pieces that range from “A Good Fence,” to “The Variety of Flowering Crabapple Tree,” to a wonderful piece called “Genuflective Detail.” It’s about nuns and kneeling and kneeling in the garden. I liked it a lot!
Taunton’s asks knowledgeable gardeners to “contribute an article, give a tip or ask a question. There are phone and FAX numbers and an e-mail address. You can visit their site and subscribe online at www.finegardening.com.
I love to get my hands in the earth and make things grow. I have a friend who bought a lovely old Victorian pile in a semi-gay area called Lavender Hill. He likes to sit in his small garden at the rear of the house, but it needs lots of TLC. During the spring of the year after he purchased the house, I went over to help select plants for what would eventually be a vision in green and white. We planted what seemed like a few gross of Snow on the Mountain seedlings, lots of white pansies and two terra cotta urns full of white tuberous begonias. He already had lots of Ostrich Ferns and common daylilies
None of us are professional gardeners. My friends in the country have been feeling their way along since they got the property about 18 years ago; a little bit here and a little bit there, change this, move that. When I was there last summer we talked about their plans for enlarging the pool area and adding a small waterfall. It’s a fifteen foot irregular shaped pool filled with waterlilies, frogs and gold fish that somehow manage to make it through the Wisconsin winters. Its only a swimming pool for their two dogs who regularly wander in to cool off.
Most of all I like their prairie garden. It’s really a meadow and it’s wonderful to look at out of the kitchen windows. It’s even better to walk through with the dogs bounding around us. There are three terraces: one at the front of the house with a pool that the dogs continually swim in, another on the back side of the house that is full of wild flowers and shade plants and the newest one that faces north and is just outside the new addition to the master bedroom.
When I wrote this review in 2001, fall was making daily attempts to get here. The frost soon took care of everything and I sat in my living room, toasty and warm, reading my own copies of Taunton’s fine Gardening. This magazine is worth a subscription just to read. It’s well worth the investment. It would also make a superb gift at any time of the year--to yourself or another.
I harvested what I could from my herb patch; bunches of herbs hung in my small kitchen. I planted hollyhocks and they bloomed in a profusion of blood red, pink and white. People stopped and asked for seeds when they ripened, so I am made little bags of seeds to give away.
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