This Garden Kalendar is composed of edited excerpts from my daily, hand-written garden journal for July-September 2020--accompanied by occasional commentaries on those passages. This Kalendar reproduces about 1/3 of my journal entries in that three-month period, a journal which records work in four gardens: the Alumni House Garden at Coe, a 1/4 acre vegetable garden on a small farm adjacent to the Wickiup Hill Outdoor Learning Center near Toddville (a garden identified as the Wickiup garden), the gardens and landscape at Buffalo United Methodist Church, and the gardens at my home on Elmhurst Drive in Cedar Rapids. While most Kalendar postings in the past have concentrated on journal entries dealing with the Coe and Wickiup gardens, the August 10th derecho upset my gardening priorities. Fortunately, the wind storm caused relatively minor long-term damage to the Alumni House Garden, but there was extensive damage to the trees and landscape at our home. In the weeks following the windstorm, I left the Coe garden to take care of itself and my gardening life shifted to the cleaning up and redesigning of our landscape and gardens on Elmhurst Drive. My August 2020 website blog post was an essay (based on journal entries) dealing with the immediate aftermath of the storm and no journal passages from those two weeks are contained in this Kalendar.. The italicized quotations inserted between some journal entries are copied from Cultivating Delight: A Natural History of My Garden by Diane Ackerman. Ackerman has long been one of my favorite nonfiction authors, and I had for several years been looking forward to reading her book on her gardening experiences. I was not disappointed.
“. . . summer days unfold like Charles Ives symphonies, full of the sprightly cacophony
we cherish, the musical noise that reassures us nature is going on her inevitable green way
and all’s right with the world.” ~Diane Ackerman
1 July 2020. World and national news.
• Pandemic rages on: 50,000 new COVID-19 cases in one day in the U.S. Huge spikes in southern states, from North Carolina through Florida and Texas and on to California.
• Black Lives Matter: turmoil over social justice for all.
• Economic catastrophe: millions of people (probably over 40 million) out of work in the U.S.
• Trump Administration: an appeal to the Supreme Court to end Obamacare and terminate provisions requiring insurance coverage for pre-existing conditions.
• Crackdown in Hong Kong: suspension of civil liberties; hundreds arrested.
• Efforts to remove monuments in honor of Confederate generals, symbols of the Lost Cause.
The list could go on and on: Middle East, Burma, Central America, Venezuela, Ethiopia, wild fires. And in the midst of all this turmoil, conflict, pain, etc., I quietly continue gardening. Given the few days or months or years left in my life, shouldn’t I be contributing my energy to some larger cause? Is it okay to spend my days sowing seeds and weeding, harvesting a few peas and beans, tending to a few flowers in a perennial flower garden?
This morning at the Coe garden I began by cleaning up the area around the shrub rose in the “H” bed, digging up horsetail and ox-eye daisies. Killed dozens of Japanese beetles in my container of soapy water. They had done serious damage to the rose bush leaves, so I cut back the shrub, eliminating most of the skeletonized leaves. I also pulled up a lot of bindweed and cut out most of the clematis winding its way through the rose bush. That was an experiment that failed: the clematis swamped the rose, overwhelmed it. I also cleaned up the front of the border, cutting back the Husker Red penstemon, the top-heavy seed heads flopping over their neighbors.
Next was the area around the “G” bed’s rose bush, which was almost impossible to reach because of all the asters and fleabane and Queen Anne’s lace. Most of those recent arrivals I pulled up, but I left several Joy Pye weed, thinking I might transplant them to the garden at Buffalo. They are great plants, just too big for the space. But I don’t want to dig them up until I know precisely where they would be planted. As for the rose bush, it was in terrible shape, the leaves decimated by the beetles. Since I was wearing gloves when pruning the rose bush, I just started killing the beetles by hand. They showed no worries about my presence.
After lunch, I drove to Wickiup. After a small rain shower that kept me in the pickup for 15 minutes, I worked on the south end of the garden, trying to clean up the oval raised bed between the grapes and the rhubarb. Task was complicated by my decision to save three volunteer tomato plants that appeared near the trellis (an old livestock panel). I gave the plants the full treatment: weeding, fertilizing, surrounding each plant with compost, covering the compost/soil with newspapers and mulch. I also trimmed each plant so there would be no leaves in contact with the soil. Since I don’t know what kind of tomatoes these are, I don’t know what to expect.
As for the rest of the bed, the ground worked nicely. I got it smoothed out and sowed a dozen Lebanese white zucchini, a variety that has been consistently productive the last two years. As I was finishing the sowing about 5:30 p.m., it began to rain hard. The sky, a uniform gray, looked like it would continue raining so I left the garden. Since I was soaked from sweat when I got home, I enjoyed a refreshing shower before fixing supper.
“I don’t mind Japanese beetles having sex on the roses.
I just wish they wouldn’t eat at the same time.”
2 July. In yesterday’s Sunday Gazette I read a piece by Veronica Larson Fowler, “Keep Watch for Invasive Plants.” She lists plants she was attracted to as a beginning gardener short of funds, plants that were cheap and spread quickly: yellow and gooseneck loosestrife, ox-eye daisies, morning glory, pampas grass, “ditch” daylilies, blackberry lilies, columbine, Missouri primrose, honeysuckle, trumpet vine, larkspur, silver artemisia, mint, purple coneflower, creeping jenny, abba rose, Zebrina hollyhock mallow, ostrich ferns, creeping periwinkle. She has since spent innumerable hours attempting to get rid of these plants and adopting more civilized varieties–such as replacing the ox-eyes with the Snow Lady hybrid and the ditch lilies with Autumn Red Hemerocallis.
Her commentary led me to reflect on the role of many flowers in the Coe garden. Some plants on her list we do not have (pampas grass, alba rose). Some are present but I don’t see as a problem and I really like (blackberry lilies, columbine, purple coneflowers, creeping jenny, Zebrina mallow). Some do create occasional problems, but it’s been possible to limit their spread through the garden (gooseneck, ox-eye daisies). And there are a few I’m periodically trying to eliminate from the garden (bindweed, perennial artemisia). I’m still of a mixed mind with regard to the Hall’s honeysuckle: although it sends out innumerable runners, I’ve kept it close to the fence and it has produced marvelous bouquets of fragrant blooms the last two years. The situation is complicated by other plants in the Coe garden that are invasive and difficult to deal with: horsetail, Queen Anne’s lace, swamp milkweed, New England asters, Canada goldenrod, crown vetch, purslane, and other weeds in the gravel walkways and lawn (such as the brown nut sedge). Gardening in the Alumni House Garden is a constant challenge, seeking adjustments in the balance of these various plants, all of which are aggressive expansionists eager to spread their progeny across the landscape.
The complete Summer 2021 Garden Kalendar is available as a pdf.