Well, it’s been a busy two weeks in the garden since last I wrote. Kevin and I have been doing chores that I have never been able to get to before because I have never had the time. One of these chores was clearing out the dead wood on the several blue spruces that define my garden.
The Colorado blue spruce is doomed. It has fallen victim to the Rhizosphaera needle cast, a fungal disease, caused by Rhizosphaera kalkhoffii (don’t you just love the name?) that attacks the needles of Colorado blue spruce in the spring, as new needles emerge. Of all the foliar diseases affecting woody landscape plants and shrubs, needle casts are the most serious for the simple reason that coniferous plants do not have the ability to refoliate, or to produce a second flush of needles from defoliated stems.
I have been keeping my blue spruces alive for the last several years by means of an annual spring and summer spraying. This year, however, Davey’s has dissed me. After confirming that my annual treatment plan was on schedule, they have not showed up to spray nor have they returned my many, increasingly frantic, calls. I don’t mind so much that they dissed me, but dissing my trees is unforgiveable.
Unable to do anything about the newly emerging and rapidly dying growth, Kevin and I decided at least we could clean out the old dead wood, accumulated over years of gradual decline. For three hours we lopped, we pruned, we dragged away. We didn’t look at the results of our work until we were done.
In most cases the results met the two criteria deemed essential by this gardener: the job was good enough and the trees looked better than they had before we started. In one case, however, the result was painful to witness. At the end of the line of spruces that form the back boundary of my property was a tree with a huge hole on one side halfway up the trunk.
We were horrified. Kevin reminded me that Sara had come out and mentioned something about an emerging bare spot, and that I had told him to continue lopping because the choice was between a bare spot and a mass of dead branches. Neither of us was prepared for the size of the hole we had made. I think we might have made a mistake.
A perfectionist by nature, I have never liked making mistakes. In school,I always focused on what I got wrong, not what I got right. 99% correct? What did I miss? But now I am a gardener, and gardeners are persons who make mistakes, lots of them. Stephanie Cohen’s The Non-Stop Gardener, one of my favorite go-to books, carries an endorsement by Steve Aiken, the editor of Fine Gardening: “I wish I had the Non-Stop Garden when I was starting out. It would have saved me plenty of trial-and-error.” Nonsense. I don’t think Aiken really believes this. Every gardener I have ever known says the same thing: “Read all you want, but you will never become a gardener unless your get out in the garden and make mistakes.”
I have become a gardener and it has led me to think differently about mistakes. I recall, clearly, the words of my first instructor at the Institute for Ecosystems Study where I got my Certificate in Garden Design. As I absorbed her passion for native shrubs and perennials, I absorbed as well her exhortation: “If you are not out there killing plants, you are not doing horticulture.” From her I learned that mistakes are not the sign of doing something wrong but the sign that you are doing something right.
Don’t get me wrong. Terrible things can happen to plants in gardens. In future newsletters I am sure I will be unable to restrain my need to rant about bad pruning practices and murderous lawn care. But these practices deserve a word far stronger than “mistakes.” How about “arborcide?”
Making mistakes as a gardener is inevitable and most mistakes are fixable. Plants, after all, are remarkably resilient. The Clematis you accidentally snipped off while cutting back dead daffodil foliage will most likely come back. The Viburnum you top-pruned, producing an ugly array of sprouts, can be re-pruned into decent shape over time. The Hosta that you thought might take more sun than most can be moved when it becomes clear that it can’t.
Mistakes can even become the source of opportunity. Perhaps you realize this year that last year’s brilliant idea for a garden based on opposing colors—red and green, blue and orange, yellow and violet—is not working out for you. Instead of demonstrating a fundamental principle of color, it is just a jumble, and way too busy. Now you have an opportunity to try a new “hot” garden of red, yellow, and orange. All you have to do is remove the blue and violet, and no doubt this removal will inspire you to start another garden of cool colors. Has that lovely red maple whiplash you planted a few years ago grown far larger than you thought possible, putting an end to your perfectly positioned sun-garden of poppies and phlox and echinacea? Consider it an opportunity to explore the magic of shade gardening and to focus on foliage.
Much creativity and energy can come from making mistakes, surviving them, and turning them to your own purposes. When people ask me how I came up with the design for my garden, I often quip that what they are admiring is simply the history of my mistakes. But now I have a problem. What should I do about the substantial hole Kevin and I have created in this one blue spruce by pruning out all its dead wood?
Do I leave it alone and enjoy the peephole it offers into my neighbor’s garden? Do I go so far as to label the hole “intentional,’ an effort to imitate on a small scale the Japanese art of the borrowed view? Do I go even further and prove my intention by pointing out the rather lovely shape of the hole? Do I try to plant a shrub underneath the pine that might fill the hole? Or do I look to hardscape for a solution, perhaps a sculpture? Then I could say as well that I made the hole on purpose to showcase the sculpture. Given this context, perhaps no one will notice the relative mutilation of the spruce tree.
I am leaning toward the latter approach and will let you know if I find an appropriate sculpture. But I must admit that the borrowed view is beginning to charm, especially as it includes a glimpse of my neighbor’s fish pond.
Meanwhile, many of you asked to see a photo of “The Grim Reaper,” aka “Hawaiian Dancer.” Here are a couple. You can see the blue spruces behind him or her.
