And next week’s Natural Gardener is all about the plants that the experts like very much.
GARDENERS TEND toward optimism, a helpful trait when dealing with insects, diseases, wind and weather, plenty of hard, dirty work, plus snails, slugs and deer. And that’s the short list, as we all know after a summer more bone-dry than we ever thought possible.
I was reminded of this cheerful, beat-all-odds attitude when I recently asked several skilled gardeners which plants they’re pleased with, and which have been downright disappointments. Being optimists, their lists of the former were much longer than their lists of the latter. Still, it’s reassuring to know you’re not the only one who spent time and money on plants that weren’t worth it. Let alone gave up precious garden space to malingerers, weedy species, or just plain duds.
It’s no surprise that The Seattle Times gardening columnist Ciscoe Morris praised even the plants he’s banished from his garden. “Persicaria napelensis is a beautiful perennial, but it seeds so aggressively, it had to go,” he says. Then there’s Anemone hybrida, which drives him crazy because it’s impossible to eradicate. And when it comes to clumping bamboo, Ciscoe issues a warning: “They’re like people, they get wider as they get older, and there’s little you can do to prevent it. Slowly but surely they invade the space of highly valued neighbor plants.” He calls the bamboo’s rhizomes “practically indestructible.”
Edible expert Bill Thorness came up with only two food plants he’s thrown overboard. One is Jerusalem artichokes, or sunchokes. He’d put up with the space such a large and sprawling plant takes up if eating them didn’t upset his stomach, no matter how many ways he’s tried cooking them. And then there’s cilantro. “I’m one of those people who thinks cilantro tastes like soap,” says Thorness, who even has an aversion to its smell.
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Amy Pennington, cook, gardener and author of several books, is no longer willing to wait three months for a head of broccoli to develop, and she feels the same about cauliflower. She doesn’t consider either to be worth the prime gardening space they take up, plus they attract aphids and cabbage moths.
“You can fill the same space with two tomato plants that will produce 20 pounds of fruit or more. We encourage clients to buy broccoli and cauliflower at the farmers market,” says Pennington. And she grows pole and bush beans rather than favas, which take longer to produce, and require so much time and work to prepare.
Greg Graves of Old Goat Farm says he’d never again give garden room to an astrantia of any type, or to our native bleeding heart Dicentra formosa. “Both were in the garden when we moved here, and I’ve been trying to get rid of them ever since,” he explains.
It’s true that the perennial astrantia roams around the garden too freely, but the ruby colored A. major ‘Hadspen Blood’ is so long-lasting and beautiful in flower arrangements that I put up with its roaming ways.
I couldn’t agree with Ciscoe more about clumping bamboo. I grow Fargesia robusta and realize how the species name is a warning I should not have ignored. I’m also disenchanted with day lilies that need endless deadheading and yearly dividing, and tired of being stabbed by the wickedly long and sharp thorns on the gorgeous Rosa ‘Westerland’. Talk about a mixed message of a plant.
All the gardeners I spoke with raved about far more plants than they dissed, and “Plants That Please” is the topic of next Sunday’s Natural Gardener column.