Favorite Plants

I have a friend who doesn't think much of hydrangeas, any hydrangeas.  She thinks they're too big and messy for most suburbans landscapes.  When she talks about hydrangeas, I see organized, well groomed, sleek yards explode into craziness with the introduction of a Limelight hydrangea hedge or Pee Gee tree hydrangea as a focal point.  She frowns slightly.  Her nose wrinkles as though a waft of bad smell has passed by.  She seldom recommends hydrangeas to anyone.

But I love hydrangeas, almost all hydrangeas.  I sell them all the time, to people with city gardens, or farmsteads, above all, to people with suburban landscapes.

I don't know why my friend dislikes hydrangeas so much but I know why I love them: they were part of Grandma's garden at Lake Shady.  Along with irises, roses, peonies and hostas, hydrangeas are archetypal plants for me.  I remember pulling apart a big, white mophead, realizing that each little piece was a flower, creating the entire bloom.  I remember watching big, slow bumblebees floating around the blooming heads, then lighting to dance on a flower, only to take off, slower and heavier.  I remember thinking as a child how lovely the hydrangeas were rising above beds of hostas in the dappled light under a vast American linden tree.

When I got gardens of my own, I put hydrangeas into them, learning to treat the shrubs like perennials, cutting them to the ground every fall to keep them from looking over-grown and messy.  I gave them top dressings of compost every fall after cutting them back and again in the spring when they leafed out.  I made sure they had adequate water during dry spells and great heat.

Originally, there were only white-flowering hydrangeas hardy in Minnesota and those are the ones I love the most.  In the last decade, many more Northern hardy varieties have become available, and while I think Annabelle is still the best seller, Endless Summer, the blue- or pink-blooming hydrangea, now gives the whites a run for their money.  I am particularly fond of Pee Gee, with its huge conical heads that go from green to white to pinkish to bronze.  Pee Gee is often pruned to make a tree, but I love the shrub form that grows to six or seven feet high, and just as wide.

Give Endless Summer soil sulfur in spring and early August to achieve the blue blooms in Minnesota, give all hydrangeas ample water, provide well-draining, rich soil, and prune, prune, prune.  Hydrangeas will work in all landscape plans, lightening shaded corners and bringing a rare blue to late summer gardens.  While many hydrangeas are large shrubs and none are small shrubs, everyone should have one, at least.  Even lazy gardeners can have success with hydrangeas.      

Container Gardening

This year I'm going to grow my tomatoes in Topsy Turveys hanging from the roof beam of my deck. I want to know how well the system works. If it works well, it frees deck space for containers full of other plants. Also, high up in the air where he can't reach them, Larkyn will not be able to eat my tomatoes before I harvest them, as he did last year. I think I'm going to choose the variety called Celebrity which is a good container tomato, but I've got time to change my mind if I find a different variety I'm curious about. I'm not planting them until the week of Mother's Day.

Growing in my recycled Monrovia containers I collected last year, I currently plan:

2 5-gallon containers with broccoli plants

3 2-gallon containers with peppers: a green bell, a banana, and a jalapeno

5 1-gallon containers with herbs: two kinds of basil, rosemary, thyme, and chives or parsley

1 2-gallon pot of pickling cucumbers

I'm still thinking about whether I want to try bush beans and summer squash. Since I want a little room for flowers, I may not have room for everything I'm thinking about. Although my deck is large for an apartment deck, I also want to be able to go out there to eat and read and write. If I am out there, Larkyn will be too. I'm wondering whether I could grow summer squash plants in a Topsy Turvey.

Right now, all I've got is the two fancy pots full of arborviteas from winter (the ones that weren't supposed to survive). I had hoped to get a garden plot in a community garden and I am on a waiting list. But my desire to grow ornamentals only on my deck is probably not going to be fulfilled. I am trying to tell myself that I'm better off with containers that are immediately to hand and so very manageable. I try to tell myself that I'm lucky to have a big deck at the price I pay in rent. I try to tell myself that many of my customers are yardless and growing anything they can in containers and that my experience helps both them and me. But the last time I had a community garden plot about one-third of the plots were abandoned as soon as their owner realized how much work vegetable gardening is. I already know that.

But I expect I'll container garden this summer and enjoy doing so. The most arduous part of container gardening is keeping all the pots uniformly moist. With a water faucet in the kitchen twenty feet away, that's not too difficult.

Driving

I love to drive. Well, maybe not when the roads are icy or in a storm of any kind or at night. But none of those weather conditions have applied this spring when I have driven in a leisurely manner down Highway 101 through Minnetonka, Wayzata, and a bit of Hopkins down to Eden Prairie. Today I went to the Hennepin County Extension Office in Eden Prairie to get soil sample kits. I gave out the last one I had last Saturday and I'm sure I'll want a number of them this coming Saturday, and maybe sooner. The weather favors busy garden centers as much as it favors my driving pleasure.

Highway 101 is windy and potholed, but passes through lovely, Arcadian estates, formerly the lake homes of wealthy Minneapolitans around Lake Minnetonka. Today the trees and shrubs were budding out in a thousand colors of green. Here and there a professional gardener was cleaning out a flower bed or raking out old mulch, wearing jackets with company names written across the back. Tulips are about three inches high and fluffy-looking but promising some vivid color soon. I drove as slowly as I dared, with Lexus SUVs and Audi sportsters on my tail. I guess if you live there, you don't need to look.

Of course, driving fast on narrow, bumpy, winding roads is a skill too, the more so in a powerful sports car, I suppose. I drive a 1998 Ford Contour. It has been such a big part of my life as a single person that I cannot imagine wanting a different car. And I've been very loyal to Ford over the years, previously driving Escorts. So when I finally have to get a new car, it won't be a Lexus or an Audi. I'm proudly middle class, but I'd be happier buying a new Ford if I thought it was really American made the way Fords used to be.

When I get through the Lake Minnetonka lake estates and reach Minnetonka, I turn off Highway 101 onto Minnetonka Boulevard going east. I turn south again on Williston Road or Baker Road. Both go into Eden Prairie west of Prairie Center Drive where the Extension office is located, so requiring one more jog on Highway 5 or Technology Drive. All this way I'm driving through the back yards of very nice suburban homes. These are the yards that most of my customers have and I like to familiarize myself with how they look coming out of winter.

They look good. All the trees and shrubs are leafing early this year. We've been exceptionally warm for several weeks, bringing leaf bud and bud break, a hazy swarm of greens. Wonderful! On my car's radio I listen to two DFL governor candidates discussing education funding, the yards and all their plants are greening spectacularly, and my car handles smoothly. I could whiz down to Eden Prairie in 20 minutes on Interstate 494, but why do that when I can enjoy, no love, driving the back roads, seeing the landscape of my community.

Warmth

March, 2010, is ending warm. Some might say hot. My bedroom window and the living room slider are open as wide as they'll go during the day and last night I only closed them half way. I think rain would turn the grass green and I can see the buds enlarging on the ash just beyond my deck. This is late-April weather!

I'm considering planting some lettuces in a pot and maybe even some basil and parsley. Ordinarily, I wouldn't even think about trying to grow warm season plants until May. But what have I got to lose? A few bucks to buy seeds that I can replant if I lose the first planting. Even a cheap-skate can live with that expenditure.

And here's my comeuppance: after many years of telling people that arborvitaes will not survive a Minnesota winter in a pot, the two I had in my greenery pots on my deck all winter are now green and thriving, waiting to be under planted with petunias, or some creeping, flowering annual now the spruce and pine boughs are removed. How many winters can they survive, I wonder. I wonder if roses would make it through the winter. What about a hydrangea?

Summer, summer! Seeming so near when the temperature is late-May warm and the sun is bright and the birds are busy and the grass is almost green. I'm afraid April will be cold and May colder this year, but today I don't want to think about cold. I'm thinking about roses and hydrangeas and petunias and fresh lettuce.

Spring Arrives

The first day of spring 2010--sunny and cold. Just a week ago the temperatures were toying with hitting 60, the dirty-rocklike snow was melting and evaporating, and spring seemed to be with us already. Now the temperature is 24 and the wind is strong enough to mention wind chill. But the sky is an intense blue, the sun is high and bright and warm, and the grass is turning green, not just in warm areas next to buildings, but out in the open.

In Minnesota, we want the colder temperatures to help slow the rise of rivers that are close to flood stage. Almost everywhere in the state, there is a dangerous river right now and all Minnesotans have vivid pictures in their minds from the last few years of spring floods--roofs of houses seeming to float on the surface of seas of dirty, swirling water. SUVs swirling in the powerful river current. Trash everywhere. The flood's aftermath, with teary, bereft victims who have lost every material possession. While we may like the camaraderie of the sandbag makers, the Grandmas bringing hotdishes, and high schools and colleges sending students to help the volunteer firemen and all the business owners and homeowners fill and stack sandbags, the devastation of floods frightens us.

Before the Iraq war, the governor would send in the National Guard to do this kind of work. Now the National Guard is in Iraq or Afghanistan and kids do it with middle aged men and women who might otherwise exercise in a fitness club. Grandmas brought hotdishes for the National Guard too, the kind of food farm families eat during harvests, high in carbs and dairy products. Newscasters marvel at the the generousity--neighborliness is not dead in our too frequently uncivil community.

In spite of flood threats, spring's rebirth is literal, not symbolic, in a climate like Minnesota's. We change from dead monotones of gray and brown, to vivid blue and green, to a carnival of lively primary, secondary and tertiary brightness in a matter of a few weeks in late April and early May. By Mother's Day (or the Fishing Opener, if you prefer) even the humblest dwelling sports a pot of flowering annuals sitting by the door or hanging from the roof or lining the windows. The plants may be dead by June 1st, forgotten and unwatered, but May is the festival of blooming annuals in Minnesota and only the evil-minded would fail to participate.

On the first day of spring, we can note the pending season. It's not really here yet, but it's coming. It's coming soon. In just a few more weeks the buds will swell in the tree branches and shrubs, and the earliest tulips will poke furled and pointed leaves out of the soil. Hearty, attentive souls will put pansy bowls out, prepared to lug them in to the garage most nights because the temperature will get too low even for pansies. But pansies are colorful, their flowers like smiling faces, and everything dreamed about spring. They are like wanting a puppy so much and then getting one.

The Birds

I've been feeding birds all winter. I have a tube feeder that I fill about every five days with a shell-less bird food that's less messy than food with shells, especially sunflower seed shells. The blend has a little bit of everything from two kinds of sunflower seeds to niger thistle seeds so I've attracted several kinds of finches, sparrows, juncos, robins (yes, all winter in Minnesota), cardinals, chickadees, nuthatches, several kinds of woodpeckers, and a pair of mourning doves.

Never before have I seen robins, juncos or mourning doves at a tube feeder, let alone one on the second story of a building. I find it interesting and slightly humorous to watch cardinals argue over the birdfeeder with juncos, both of which are ground feeders in the normal course of things. The mourning doves sit on the deck rails and wait politely for finches and chickadees to leave. The robins are down right clumsy--not that I blame them. Why aren't they in Mexico? I didn't know they liked birdseed, but then, winter in Minnesota drove my ancestors to eat lutefisk, so maybe it drives robins to eat safflower seeds.

This evening I put out some dry bread cubes. I had a few old, stale slices and made a bread pudding with half--my own treat--and, not wanting to waste the rest, I made a tin foil bowl and placed it under the tube feeder on the floor of the deck, filled with the remaining bread cubes. Now I'm worrying that the wind will blow my nice thought off the deck before any birds find it. I should probably also be concerned that a squirrel will find it. Usually the birds patrol the feeder for squirrel interference without my help but I think most squirrels would go to war over bread faster than birdseed.

But I don't see any birds or squirrels in the yard though it is dusk, a prime feeding time. I do see two heavily bundled toddlers waddling up the hill. Maybe one of the larger dogs that live in my complex is lying in wait, too, hoping to snag a squirrel. Birds don't care about toddlers or dogs, though so maybe the birds are eating somewhere else this evening.

I hope they find the bread in the morning.

The New Library

When I first moved to Plymouth almost a year ago, I searched for the library but failed to find it. I found a huge and beautiful one down the road near Ridgedale and went there a few times, fighting a dozen others for each emptying parking place and usually ending up walking a quarter mile from the parking place I got. I even had a mocha there one time and considered ordering a panini another time. I looked at interesting art work and admired the views from the huge windows. But--bottom line--the books were the same old weary public library best sellers, chic lit, and Clive Cusslers with a few classics dotted here and there.

Then I realized that the building project I drove by on my way to work every day was going to be a library. This week it opened and today I visited it for the first time. What a pleasure.

I walked by the New Fiction shelf on my way to the fiction stacks. New Fiction means newly published fiction in this library because, when I got to the fiction area, I found that every volume was new. Three new copies of Jane Austen's Persuasion. Brand new copies of all of Saul Bellow's books. A shiny-jacketed copy of Laurie Colwin's Family Happiness. On down the stacks I went, marveling. A new library with new books.

I decided to allow myself to be the first to read two, but what to choose? I decided on a perfectly public library sort of book, a family saga by Marianne Fredriksson called Hanna's Daughters which was originally written in Swedish and first published in 1994. My second book is a new work by a writer I've been meaning to read, Lorrie Moore, who is famous for a book of short stories called Birds of America, also the title of a 60's novel by Mary McCarthy. This newly published book is called A Gate at the Stairs.

Now I have until April 7 to read them. Several rainy days would help, though I think I can read them in that time even if the weather is like today, warm and sunny. Ten degrees warmer and I'll be able to read on my deck comfortably. But that is a great deal to ask for.