Garden Update: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

THE GOOD

Our white datura are beginning to blossom. We grew these from seed started back in Spring. I have about a dozen plants scattered throughout the yard and the ones in the sunniest location (on the south west corner of the house) are doing the best. Each plant has between six and eight buds.

And the white cone flowers in the moon garden are gorgeous. I love them so much that I just asked a neighbor down the street--a total stranger--if I can have some of her purple cone flowers when she divides them; they're completely taking over her corner flower bed and are choking out everything else. Later, I realized I must have looked a tad crazy, accosting her in her front yard and asking if she'll let me dig in her garden. But she did say yes. It's one way to meet my neighbors, I guess.

This picture I just took a few minutes ago, when I brought Maggie outside for "last call." I know it's dark, and a bit fuzzy, but this is what greets me when I step outside at night. It's one of my favorite stretches. The day lilies are an almost-neon shade of yellow.


THE BAD

I killed the grass on the west side of the house about a month and a half ago to prep for a massive flower bed and shrub border. Although I swore I was not going to use any chemicals on the lawn--organic all the way, baby!--the crabgrass and other weeds were so bad here, with such deep root systems, that I bought a bottle of Roundup Grass and Weed Kill and sprayed the area down. It didn't take much, and within three weeks it was all dry and crusty. But the grass doesn't pull out as easily as I thought it would, and I've been meaning to borrow my cousin's cultivator the next time I see him. But, you know, something else always comes up. I had to wait for a wind-free day and spray very close to the surface of the lawn, so I wouldn't get any overspray on the ninebark bushes or the river birch.

THE UGLY

This is the result. My poor neighbors have had to look at this for weeks, and I've heard more than a few snide comments wafting in through the windows. (See how close the house is to the sidewalk? Do they not think I will hear them?) Several of the ones I've encountered outside ask, "What happened to your grass?" I thought the straight lines looked deliberate, but two or three thought it was a disease or something that attacked the lawn. Weird.

Anyway, this week I'll be doing something about the eyesore.

In case you're wondering, as I was, just what Roundup is, how it works, and how evil I was for using it, here's a little info I found out at How Stuff Works:

Glyphosphate-based herbicides all work on the same biochemical principle -- they inhibit a specific enzyme [EPSP synthase] that plants need in order to grow...Without that enzyme, plants are unable to produce other proteins essential to growth, so they yellow and die over the course of several days or weeks. A majority of plants use this same enzyme, so almost all plants succumb to Roundup...In the same way that many antibiotics gum up enzyme production to kill bacteria, glyphosphate gums up enzymes in plants to kill them...The question of safety is a hard one to answer because there is a lot of polarized and conflicting information. Here are a few things we can probably say with some certainty:

• Given the amount of glyphosphate sprayed on the planet every day, it is probably safe to say that glyphosphate is not violently toxic to people or animals. People do not have the same enzymes in their cells that plants do, just like human cells and bacteria differ enough that antibiotics kill bacteria cells but not human cells.

• On the other hand, most people react badly to glyphosphate (and other chemicals mixed with it) when ingested or applied to the skin, so you want to avoid any contact with the chemical.

• Roundup will kill almost any plant, including aquatic plants, so you want to be sure to avoid spray drift onto other plants or into water. Any pesticide should be applied carefully.

Foundations for a Moon Garden

As Bill, one of my college roommates, said recently, gardening is about killing plants as much as it is about growing them. It was with some degree of sadness that we took out these overgrown forsythia earlier this year.

We had thought of taking a master gardening friend's suggestion, and hacking them to ground level to start fresh. Unfortunately, there were so many weed trees growing through them, that we eventually agreed we'd never be able to completely kill those and leave the forsythia. It's hard to see the weed trees growing in here, because they haven't leafed out in these pictures, but we had rogue maples and elms completely twisted through the forsythia.

With the removal of those trees (which would be just off the left edge of this next picture), we were left with nothing growing on this side of the house. On a corner lot, we felt very, very exposed.

And so we decided to plant a moon garden. A moon garden is simply a flower bed that primarily has white flowers, particularly night-blooming ones like moonflowers, datura (angel trumpets), and the like, as well as shrubs with light-colored foliage--think white and green hostas, dappled willows, azaleas with pale-green leaves. Anything that would be illuminated by the light of the moon at night, giving the garden a special glow.

Here is where the forsythia and weed trees once stood. I built a bit of a berm, that rises about eight inches above the rest of the yard. Next year, I plan on placing trellises on the outer edge and growing moonflowers on them. (That's our neighbor's bed of hostas in the back. The trellis will block this view, much as I like our neighbors and their garden, and give the moon garden more of an intimate feel.) Because we have a new saw, I will be building the trellises myself.

For now, there is a white hibiscus in the center, two azaleas, a trio of astilbles (peach and light pink), and two white something-or-others whose name escapes me at the moment. Everything is still quite small, of course, because we're trying to do this as cheaply as possible. (Home Depot started clearancing 1-gallon perennials this week.)

Here's a long view of it.

The smoke tree was a coup. I came across a sign at Home Depot that said "ALL fruit, flowering, and shade trees 50% off (with exception of Japanese maples and evergreens)." Even though they didn't intend to include the smoke trees, it does in fact have flowers (the tag says so), so I asked for and got the discount. Score! Only $25.

Here's a before for the rest of the moon garden (with the crappy old windows we replaced last fall):

And how it's coming along:

Yup, that's a lot of work for one season. Here's the view from the corner of the house:

The bulging bit is mostly filled with freebie hostas we received from friends and family, but we have many bulbs coming up that should flower soon, as well as daturas, daisies, and white echinachias. And in the center, because I missed them, there is a forsythia that we picked up after Home Depot clearanced them. We'll still have our yellow flowers in the spring, before the rest of the garden wakes up.

Silently, one by one, in the infinite meadows of heaven,
Blossomed the lovely stars, the forget-me-nots of the angels.
—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Evangeline