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Overview
“A Way to Garden prods us toward that ineffable place where we feel we belong; it’s a guide to living both in and out of the garden.” —The New York Times Book Review
For Margaret Roach, gardening is more than a hobby, it’s a calling. Her unique approach, which she calls “horticultural how-to and woo-woo,” is a blend of vital information you need to memorize and intuitive steps you must simply feel and surrender to. In A Way to Garden, Roach imparts decades of garden wisdom on seasonal gardening, ornamental plants, vegetable gardening, design, gardening for wildlife, organic practices, and much more. She also challenges gardeners to think beyond their garden borders and to consider the ways gardening can enrich the world. Brimming with beautiful photographs of Roach’s own garden, A Way to Garden is practical, inspiring, and a must-have for every passionate gardener.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9781604699173 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Timber Press, Incorporated |
Publication date: | 04/30/2019 |
Sold by: | Hachette Digital, Inc. |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 320 |
File size: | 79 MB |
Note: | This product may take a few minutes to download. |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Preface
My how times have changed. Though at first thought, the idea of rekindling a 21-year-old garden book might not seem like a task as radical or needed as, say, redoing one of the same vintage about computers, it turns out otherwise. Yes, we still use shovels (if not Word 6.0; I’m now pecking away on version 16.16.2). Yes, the horticultural operating system still begins with “green side up,” though I did recently gift a friend some paperwhite narcissus to force, forgetting to state what seemed to me the obvious. I got a call a few weeks later asking why white spaghetti was sprouting from the pot.
And one more yes, before we get to all the nos. Were they alive, my money’s on the likelihood that Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein would still be discussing the most perennial of evergreen garden topics:
The story goes that Toklas once asked Stein what she saw when she closed her eyes.
“Weeds,” Stein replied.
Me, too; now and forever, I forecast that the gardener shall forevermore have plants growing in the wrong place, ad infinitum, ad nauseam. Help!
Much else has been upended, I came to realize as I dug in to revise the book. No, mere updates would not do, Margaret. The catalog sources at the back of the first edition are now mostly fond memories of old friends long gone from the business. (Their progeny live on in my garden, and I still unearth the occasional old plastic label, the printing so faded as to be nearly illegible.)
Some “it” plants of that moment that everyone grew (or wanted to, if only they could secure a piece) are now known thugs, and I, like gardeners everywhere, will spend the rest of my days hoicking them out, sometimes losing the battle. Their tenacity is an in-our-faces, perennial reminder of inadvertent environmental wrongdoing—of cultivating what proved to become invasives.
Plants that were rare—a dramatic variegated- or gold-leaf version some savvy gardener identified from a sport, perhaps—stayed that way a relatively long while. The ramp up to wider distribution was once upon a time dictated by the math of the plant’s inclination to set seed or provide ample divisions or cuttings. As tissue culture laboratories have proliferated, and the secrets of micropropagation, or cloning, for more species unlocked, the pace for many plants has likewise accelerated. Advancements in other methods of mass production, like of wholesale baby plants called liners or plugs, has evolved, too, in ever more mechanized greenhouse facilities. You barely have time to gloat over being among the first to have something special, before it confronts you en masse at the big-box store.
I knew, and grew, some native plants back then—notably winterberry hollies and asters—but our current collective consciousness about the role of natives, about habitat gardening and pollinator gardening, had not taken hold. Today native status is even printed on plant labels (though often imprecisely, since few things are native to the entire nation). The word “nativar,” for a cultivar of a native plant with showier attributes or a different habit than the straight species, has been added to the vocabulary.
Ticks were familiar, but those tiny arachnids hadn’t yet traumatized a chunk of the nation. Our longtime No. 1 annual, the impatiens, hadn’t been assaulted by a devastating fungus-like disease called impatiens downy mildew, and a related species of DM hadn’t yet attacked beloved basil. (As I type this, news is just out that the impatiens genome “sequence and assembly” has been cracked, a critical step in developing a strategy to breed in resistance someday to DM.) And so many introduced forest pests have increased their pressure: The ever-wider encroachment of hemlock woolly adelgid, as one example, saw to it in these ensuing years that I would not dare plant Tsuga. Instead I mourn former stands of what was a foundation species of the northeastern forests I live surrounded by.
Even the earthworm has evolved from being regarded as a gardener’s (and farmer’s) best friend to a leading suspect in environmental havoc. I didn’t even know years back that there were no native earthworms in the northern United States—that they were all introduced species (including many kinds in warmer regions). And nobody knew just how destructive some of the latest imports, notably jumping worms from Asia in the genera Amynthas and Metaphire, would prove to gardens, yes, but to forest ecologies most terrifyingly, as they impoverish soil and interrupt the process of succession in parts of the Great Lakes Forest, the Great Smoky Mountains, and New England. We will be hearing more about them regularly, I forecast. Need I mention that the gardener’s other once-reliable companion, the weather, doesn’t seem very friendly or familiar at all, either, as the climate shifts? The expected meteorological pacing of each space of a season is no longer, and all the time we face extremes that are ever more perplexing to manage around.
As unsettling to keen gardeners (and to a greater degree, farmers) has been consolidation of the seed industry, as seed genetics became regarded as intellectual property—something to patent and own. The number of players has shrunk to a few giants, and their focus is on money-makers—genetically engineered agribusiness crops, yes, and also classically bred hybrids suited to large-scale farming because of their uniformity, perhaps, or inclination to ripen all at once for ease of harvest. Some heirloom home-garden seeds that didn’t have such profit potential got neglected, but, blessedly, counterforces have risen up to protect and reinvigorate some of them.
I didn’t know years back that my garden would become a laboratory for data collection. Though I was interested in science—something the garden opened up for me in a way no high school teacher ever had—I was not yet one of what are now millions of citizen scientists who today record backyard observations, adding my bird counts and moth counts and more to giant databases that scientists can use for research (but could not compile without us). In the old text of the book, I could hear the first hints of the gardener, and person, I would become. I met a Margaret who was, as I am now, devoted to organic practices, and already proselytizing. I also met one-time friends, plants that starred in the first edition but have since gone—not because they all died, but because my enthusiasms shifted. For example, once mad for silver, I’m now all about the gold (leaves, that is).
A younger Margaret shared joyful anecdotes of interactions with the first birds she came to know, and an apparent delight at a growing number of beneficial insects, too, as her deepening sense of connection to the bigger picture took hold. Missing in the original book were amphibian adventure stories, as their populations in the garden have multiplied to almost comical proportion, and I have undergone the metamorphosis into She Who Lives with Frogs. I likewise failed then to celebrate my reptilian brethren—to trumpet how important it is to make snakes at home in an organic garden. There is good reason for that last oversight: I was not yet a recovering ophidiophobiac. Quite to the contrary.
Today, I describe my approach to gardening as “horticultural how-to and ‘woo-woo’”—a blend of stuff you need to memorize, like how deep to plant a daffodil bulb, and stuff you need to feel when you witness a seed germinating, for instance, and just surrender to (like getting over a fear of snakes, and instead of screaming, thanking them for eating slugs and mice). I was glad I could hear both how-to and woo-woo notes in the old Margaret, and my nowadays constant invocation to strive for a 365-day garden was evident, if not labeled yet as such. I guess I am still me (or always was?).
One more thing, or actually two, have not changed even a little. First, I garden because I cannot help myself. I hope that you may feel that calling.
Most of all: this book is still titled A Way to Garden because it is not the only way, just my way. It’s the one way I have gradually sorted out despite all the shifts in trends and technology and even the taxonomic order of things, as tried-and-true plants were renamed (and sometimes then unrenamed for dizzying good measure). Whatever pest or predicament is thrown at me, onward I do dig, and most of all: weed. Perhaps mine is a way to garden that will work for you, too. I hope so.
Table of Contents
Preface: And Now, 21 Years Later 9
Introduction: Beyond Outdoor Decorating 17
Conception January And February 31
New Cycle, A New Season
Studying the Catalogs
Early, Middle, Late
Look Out the Window: Design 101
Planning, on Paper or Otherwise
Journals: Writing It All Down
Zones and Other Considerations
Taxonomy Lite
Say What? Speaking Latin
Hybrid, Heirloom, or Both?
Seed Viability versus Vigor
First Sowing: Onions and Leeks
Saying No to Deer
Pruning, Pared Way Down
Intermediate Witch Hazels
Hellebores Galore
Plants with Structure
Birth March And April 71
Groundhog Day
Gardening for the Birds
Powerhouse Bird Plants
When to Start Seeds
18 Seed-Starting Tips
Why Seedlings Stretch and Get Spindly
Making a Bed, with Cardboard
How to Shop for Plants (and Not)
Ephemerals
Dividing Trilliums
Planting Peas, with Mendel in Mind
Hydrangea Pruning
My Gold Foliage Issue
Forsythia Alternatives
Animal-Resistant Flower Bulbs
The Ever-Reliable Narcissus
Pruning Clematis
A Particular Pulmonaria
Finding Room for More Natives
What is Native Where?
Spring Water-Garden Regimen
Name Game: Know Your Weeds
Youth May and June 125
A Season for Sisterhood
Nuisance Wildlife
Tough-Love Transplanting
Editing Self-Sowns
13 Things About Growing Tomatoes
Salad Days
Sow, Sow, Sow Again
Investment Plants
Ornamental Onions
Fumitories and Aroids, Oh My
Euphorbias
Ferns
Peonies
A Moment for Lilacs
Making Mosaics (Underplanting)
Confidence Builders, Rethought
A Must-Have Rose
Water Garden in a Pot
Organic Lawn Care
Mulch Wisdom
Growing Potatoes
Adulthood July And August 183
Throwing in the Trowel
Fall Vegetable Garden
A Few Good Living Mulches
Meadow Plants, Mowing Strategies
Cutbacks
Fetid but Fantastic Eucomis
Southeast Native, Northeast Garden
Weavers and See-Throughs
Insect Love (or at Least Respect)
Foliage, the Garden's Wardrobe
Squash Madness
Viburnums
Not Your Average Morning Glories
Tall Perennials
Houttuynia, and Other Weeds I Planted
Senescence September And October 223
Nothing Lasts
Fall Leaves and Pink Mums
Repeat After Me
Making Compost
A Longer Clematis Season
When Inner Conifer Needles Turn Brown
Putting Up a Year of Herbs
I Just Call Them Asters
Cover Crops: Feeding the Soil
Smarter Bulb Shopping and Planting
Eranthis, the Winter Aconite
A Nectaroscordum by Any Name
Saving Seeds
How to Grow Garlic
Storing and Preserving Garlic
A Saner Fall Cleanup
Mad Stash: Overwintering Tender Plants
Taking the Year's Inventory
Death And Afterlife November And December 263
Dear Friend (Love, Margaret)
The Asset of Bark
Cultivating Snags, or Wildlife Trees
Winterizing the Water Garden
Winterberry Hollies
Willing Houseplants
Conifers I Have Known
My Seed-Shopping Rules
A Wheelbarrow Full of Prevention
References and Sources 291
Acknowledgments 301
Photo Credits 303
Index 305