Site compiled by David Neumeyer
File created 31 December 2004. Last updated 25 January 2005.

Mad Fancies:

"Do not be alarmed if all of a sudden you can't think of anything but crocuses. Or it may be daffodils. This happens to gardeners. The brain is fully infused with some plant or other, and for several days...the mind goes in only one gardening channel. There is no point phoning some gardening friend to talk about daffodils if he happens to be in a dahlia mode. It will pass, and he'll phone to talk about daffodils, but by that time you will be in your peony period." (One Man's Garden, p. 61)

On more than one occasion since we moved to Austin four years ago, I have been sorely tempted to uproot all the roses and give my attention to potted camellias, which have plenty of space available to them under our small grove of live oak trees.

But the roses are still there because, as Mitchell advises about such mad fancies, one should indulge them in imagination, not in reality. As violently as they arrive, they are displaced by some new fancy -- or, if one is lucky, by a moment or two of sanity. In my experience, one makes steady progress toward a satisfying garden simply by continuing to care about it and to make some effort to keep it all going. Granted, this is slow work -- each of my gardens took ten years to come into its own (and in each case, this was very shortly before we moved away).

Mad fancies become dangerous to this progress only if they turn into addictions, sucking time, space, and money away from the garden as a whole. Like any addiction, you recognize it at the moment when pleasure turns to burden, when free will turns to entrapment. On the scale of decades, I passed there with roses twice -- and a relapse threatened again with the most recent move. But I am now safely past not just the roses, but the camellias, too. Now it's on to something that is still unalloyed pleasure -- building a garden for butterflies and hummingbirds.

"A garden should be, of course, whatever the gardener can make of it, and this is (as a rule) not much. But it is more important for the gardener to be enchanted than for critics to be pleased." (Essential Earthman, p. 69)

I have used this principle (though not entirely without feelings of guilt) for many years now. I have strived to make the front yard presentable (having at least the minimum necessary "curb appeal," as the realtors put it -- by which they mean carefully tailored and entirely unimaginative, like the cookie-cutter development homes behind the plantings), but the back yard has been my own. I like to say that it is "creative" -- by which I mean that the ubiquitous messy places have some reason behind them. They are always part of a plan, and never mind if that plan is a year old, and nothing has been done on it since the first burst of energy during some long-forgotten weekend.

Several years ago, I was embarrassed (and irritated) when an appraisor came by (we were selling our house in order to move out of state) and stood in my back yard, staring wide-eyed at a hillside that consisted mainly of torn-up or half-finished terrace beds. Hadn't she the wits to see what this would shortly become? Apparently not, as we were disappointed in the appraised value. As it happened, we sold the house -- at our price -- to the first person to view it. He wanted it because of the garden. Hah.

"Do not concern yourself to conceal the boundaries since that is the wrong way of looking at it. " (Essential Earthman, p. 69)

This command has always made little sense to me. The tradition of the garden, after all, in East and West, is that of the walled space devoted to plants, a place for contemplation and contemplative pleasure disconnected from the outside world. I admit freely to a schizoid view of landscaping -- the front yard is for the public and my public self, but the backyard (fenced and hedged, of course) is for my private self. I avoid going into the front yard on days when I don't want to meet people -- whether or not I am likely to do so -- and I always think of what to wear. In the back, I can spend whole days unkempt and happy. I even plan purchases to build up supplies for such days -- compost for digging beds, new plants to fill spaces, seeds to sow in a nursery bed. A backyard storage shed, ugly and intrusive as those things inevitably are, is a great staging place for tools and projects.

What Mitchell meant, as he explains immediately after this quote, is "don't overdo it." No twelve-foot stone walls or thirty-foot hedges encasing yard and house. Unless that's right for your property. That's the nub of it -- do think of the back yard as a private ("walled") space, but don't be afraid to take advantage of desirable elements of its context. In the Ohio valley, for instance, a gap in the pine trees hedging our back fence looked up to a neighbor's young-ish tulip tree, to another neighbor's taller Norway spruce and, two houses later, to eighty-foot-tall trees marching in a hedgerow by a farmer's field. The effect of distance was amazing, and most welcome in a backyard as squashed as ours (sixty-five feet from house to back fence, uphill).

"It's Human Nature, or at least a gardener's nature (which is not quite the same thing), to want to live at least one and preferably two climatic zones warmer than where he gardens. " (One Man's Garden, p. 91)

Unless, of course, you are lucky enough to live in one of those warm climatic zones, in which case you pine after plants that prefer things a bit cooler. When I visited central Illinois in May last year, the maple and black oak trees were a pleasant reminder of the north, and peonies and lilacs seemed like the unreachable visions of another world -- well, more or less: the point is that they suddenly seemed much more precious than they ever were when I could grow them with ease in the Ohio valley. (There apparently is a common lilac (vulgaris) type that will grow and flower in central Texas, but I am suspicious that it may be a figment of some nursery salesman's imagination, as I have never seen one actually growing in a garden here.)

But the most striking thing about this Illinois trip was indeed a surprise: the odor of just-mown grass. That distinctive sweet haylike smell is the smell of bluegrass, not just the smell of any grass. Bermuda, St. Augustine, and zoysia grasses we grow here have no smell to amount to anything, and the thatchy smell of buffalo grass, okay outdoors, is rather questionable when it comes inside on the dogs. Too bad that something with such utility -- buffalo grass is by far the best for a backyard meadow -- cannot have the extra gift of a sweet smell.

"It's Human Nature, or at least a gardener's nature (which is not quite the same thing), to want to live at least one and preferably two climatic zones warmer than where he gardens. " (One Man's Garden, p. 91)

This is a postscript to the preceding gloss. We do have our share of tropicals used as annuals, like the several cupheas -- the handsome-foliaged blue "Mexican heather" or the cigar plant, one of many excellent hummingbird plants -- or the bird of paradise or the uncommon sorts of zinnia and marigold, but I don't see the same fainting and weeping I might have indulged in over the demise of a china rose or camellia in the north. Where I do find myself urgently nudging the climate south is with houseplants, which I would rather treat as outdoor potted plants that just happen to come inside a couple months in the winter. Alas, this isn't Phoenix, San Diego, or even Jacksonville -- we live at the southern edge of that vast great prairie system whose northernmost region is the tundra of the Northwest Territories. Weather really can and does dive straight almost south four thousand miles in a land like this, and on such occasions I am forcefully reminded that my "Maid of Jamaica" is in exile from her homeland.

Still, eight to nine months of the year outdoors is enough to make "houseplant" a questionable label for my assorted dracaenas, dieffenbachias, cordylines, and other such critters. And the prairie weather gives us a subtle yet unmistakable sense of the passing of seasons. What a wonderful place to live.

"Lang's Rain Factor...decrees that humus tends to accumulate in the soils of cool, wet regions, but disappears quickly in the soils of warm climates; in arid regions it hardly forms at all." (Scott Ogden, Gardening with Difficult Soils, p. 9)

Is that it? Is that everything -- a grand, simple practical principle? An overarching garden heuristic from which all the everyday common sense of gardening derives? If so, it explains how I lost the salvia leucantha. I planted it in the wrong soil, and instead of growing poorly, it died. I have noticed that sort of stark response from too many plants here. In the Ohio valley, many plants would struggle on, growing fitfully or sitting still -- their only real challenge was winter, which tested with cold and frost heaving.

Some plants are adapted (that is, they know the principle that we humans have to learn), and one must have the wits to pay attention. Now I am suddenly very cold on camellias, except in 18" pots under the shade of the live oaks in the little grove we call the Texas zen garden but which now looks more like a carnival with its multi-colored collection of pots, statuary (there is a smiling buddha), groundcover plants, patios, and paths.

What I have learned is nothing more than the truth of what every garden writer says: take care of the soil first, then let it take care of the plants.

"Lang's Rain Factor...decrees that humus tends to accumulate in the soils of cool, wet regions, but disappears quickly in the soils of warm climates; in arid regions it hardly forms at all." (Scott Ogden, Gardening with Difficult Soils, p. 9)

Another postscript. Peat moss belongs in the north -- that's what Lang's Rain Factor tells us. Having used peat moss as a soil amendment with great success for many years in the Ohio valley, I naturally turned to it on moving to Texas. Disaster followed -- and pretty quickly, too. Now it amazes me stores sell the stuff here (but then I have noticed a northern prejudice in most chain-store ads, a prejudice that presumably comes from its buyers). Yes, I had heard comments that peat moss should be avoided, but the lunatic argument offered was that peat moss is a non-renewable resource and therefore the responsible gardener would not use it. Hah. Noises about non-renewable resources sound pretty funny coming from Texans. Peat moss is just as renewable as oil.

Being contrarian -- and cheap -- I used a fair bit of peat moss during my first season in Texas. The death toll included roses, salvias, and a number of vegetables. Peat moss is a perfectly adequate idea for a real winter, but it's dismally dangerous for our three summer months of dry 100-degree heat. So again, peat moss belongs in the cool and rainy north -- that's what Lang's Rain Factor tells us.

"Take it as unarguable (and of course it can be argued forever) that....black-eyed Susans are not worth growing. Unless, of course, they remind you of something disreputable that happened one summer when you were seventeen. Which, I am sure, is why people grow them. Can't think of any other reason." (One Man's Garden, p. 160)

Alas, I must take issue with Mitchell on this one. Much that is remarkable has happened since I started gardening in this strange meeting place of several climates and regions that is south-central Texas, but the most amazing to me is the back-yard meadow. The buffalo grass has made it all possible -- and lest any unwary reader think "wow, this is great; no mowing, and you just sit back and enjoy the meadow," let me say now that keeping weeds out of the buffalo grass is a year-round burden -- my roughly 30 x 40 foot meadow requires far more work than our front-yard lawn.

But, back to the rudbeckia: the great presence in this meadow through the early summer heat is the local black-eyed Susan. It is not only stalwart but beautiful.

I do grant that the familiar "Goldsturm" variety has an odd, too-selfconsciously-cottage-garden look about it, but then so does the echinacea "Magnus." Neither would ever fit in a meadow setting, but in a border they look fine, and I can tell you that the butterflies don't care about the prissiness, nor, at end of season, do the goldfinches, who munch the seeds. Tastes change, which is a way of saying that cultural standards change -- and, well, generations change. I think it is fair to say that the standard is no longer the clipped box hedge and Mitchell's beloved German iris. Now it's not so cut and dried: with a vestige of that past, plus the requirement that butterflies come and flowers look good mixed with veggies in a complex border or bed.

"I have had dogs of exceptional beauty, and from animal shelters I have had dogs so odd-looking that people laughed to see them, and my present mongrel is as close to my heart as dogs far handsomer. Same with plants. But with dogs as with people, physical beauty is relatively unimportant, while in plants for the garden, physical beauty is a much greater consideration." (One Man's Garden, p. 160)

Well, perhaps, but I sold a house by packing the terraces on the back hill, going out of my way to enrich the soils one spring and then planting with roses and dahlias (our back yard was mostly hillside -- and facing the house, too, which made the whole thing seem quite a bit smaller than it really was). Both roses and dahlias are on Mitchell's list of plants that are not irises, that is to say, plants that have flaws, and so fail in natural, inherent aesthetic value by some scale or another -- whether it's plant form, leaf, or flower.

It has always seemed odd to me that he did not criticize daylilies -- their loose mounds of fat grassy leaves frequently have a faintly chartreuse undertone that blends reluctantly with many other border colors, including the daylilies' own flowers. And, although it rises early in the spring, and is very welcome then, the foliage looks ragged and dry by August. The blooms hang onto the stalk and look decidedly sodden and ugly (very like the faded blooms of an iris, actually -- heh, heh). Some of the colors breeders have achieved should be banned.

And yet the daylily was one of my favorites in the north, where it ruled the July garden like a queen. I am still proud of a forty-foot-long raised bed than ran parallel to the bottom of the hill and consequently was often wet -- for spring, Siberian irises; for summer, daylilies; and for fall, New England asters. Which proves that mongrels in groups can surpass the isolated beauty queen.

"But then, garden plants can be made to adapt. And why not, the rest of us do." (One Man's Garden, p. 170)

An odd outcome of my most recent re-reading of Mitchell's three books is that I am less enamored of his garden now than before -- at least as a model for my own. I know it better and in more detail (at least as it probably was in 1993, the year of his death), but it must have been a real jungle (as he admits and as photographs elsewhere on this site confirm). With a good collection of roses, vines, grapes, etc., and several horse tanks with water gardens -- plus a summerhouse -- it's hard to imagine where the large shrub he suddenly mentions for the first time in a late chapter could possibly fit. But I'm sure he made it do -- like the campsis on the north wall (don't you try that). Gardens are personal, as he reminds us, and I should have real trouble with his. I don't like clutter in the garden any more than I do in the house. Not that I have gardened with plants spaced generously and with vistas on all sides -- even now, when I have more space, it's a challenge to maintain our exceptional, tall cedar elm in its solitary glory. There is, after all, so much space beneath it.

On a fence just east of the tree I could put the coral honeysuckle, which Mitchell touts as everblooming and native. Campsis will attract wasps, so it must be placed somewhere else (not that wasps ever bother me, but they do make others nervous). And after all Mitchell's remarks about tulips and daffodils, I suppose I should miss them, but I don't (I had something like the classic "sweeps" of daffodils in my last Ohio valley garden) -- freesias, tuberoses, amaryllis, ismenes, etc., compensate nicely, thank you.

"The challenges presented by limestone, alkaline clay, and caliche soils are admittedly profound, but these grounds will educate any who persist to garden upon them." (Scott Ogden, Gardening with Difficult Soils, p. 195)

I have always thought that the greatest virtue in gardening is not the exercise, but the patience it teaches. That's probably what Ogden means -- in my experience, these soils will usually educate by killing off your favorite plants, and pretty quickly, too, if they are being aided by the occasional hard frost in late winter or by summer's relentless heat and drought. The only equivalent level of frustration in the north was reached by deaths caused through frost heaving.

It does no good to complain -- one simply has to take time to learn a few basic practices and a hundred subtleties of plant choice, placement, and care. The latter part is exhilarating -- I have never lived in a place with such an astonishing variety of plant options -- but it means still more to know. Soil and watering conditions for the common salvia species alone will keep one busy learning for a long time. Some salvias, for instance, resent foliar feeding. Roses grafted on multiflora stock are at a disadvantage here. Raised beds are essential to success, but you have to break up the ground below, also, or you'll make the watering job much worse (and perennials with any sort of root system won't grow at all). Contrary to all common sense, there are quite a few plants that thrive in the dry and root-filled shade under live oaks. Zub zub zub (as Mitchell would say). Being a nervous sort by nature, I have always found patience hard. But here I have already become the most patient sort of gardener -- remarkable what you can do when you have no choice.

"I do not spray anything, partly because I have noticed over the decades that the average gardener who does spray gets no results whatever from his efforts except to do in a certain number of innocent insects, " (Henry Mitchell on Gardening, p. 129)

Memory plays odd tricks, especially as one ages. Or at least, it does with me. I admire Henry Mitchell's writing in part because of the resonance it strikes in my own mind -- my attitude toward gardening is so close to his. However, I can longer recall whether the fact that I generally avoid spraying with chemicals came before I read his books or afterwards (and therefore because of them). To be sure, the qualifier "generally" is important -- it means "most of the time but not absolutely always." In the Ohio valley gardens, where Japanese beetles have been a scourge since the mid-1980s, I took delight in zapping the bugs with pyrethrins. The sad truth is that I even sprayed with sevin a couple times. Finally, it made more sense to remove most summer-blooming roses and expand the inventory of the delightful and profuse spring bloomers, gallicas, damasks, ramblers, and so on.

One spring in Texas I sprayed the same pyrethrins on aphids, who had made me pay a heavy price for a rose-garden monoculture on one side of the yard. After doing this two or three times, I decided to take a chance that the worst was over. Just as well -- three days later, ladybugs and aphid lions (ladybug larvae) in large numbers were hard at work. I counted fifteen aphid lions on one plant alone. I've never seen anything like it. The lions have since retired to a sheltered wall to molt and transform into ladybugs. Needless to say, that was the end of bug sprays for the season.

When I read a gardening book, I always go to the rose chapter first, to see whether the author picked up knowledge first-hand (by growing them him or herself), second-hand (by talking with real rose gardeners), or "third-hand" (by reading about roses in a book). This provides a crude but effective measure that tells much about the rest of the book. One can easily detect the change of voice -- an infinitesimal shift from second-hand confidence to the sure hand of concrete experience -- and thereby lets one more easily judge where, in other chapters, the author can be trusted.

I have several benchmarks, among them blackspot on Pemberton's hybrid musks. They all get it, alas, with Cornelia and Daybreak being least bothered in the places I have gardened. Of course, coastal California gardeners are spared -- there the hybrid musks are truly at home -- and, so I am told, the same is true of New Zealand. And through all this you can hear the change of voice: I have myself stood in the garden deeply frustrated by blackspot on Penelope, Felicia, and Danaë (all of whom were subsequently "shovel-pruned," an ugly but unambiguous phrase); I have seen and heard coastal California gardens and gardeners; but I have never visited New Zealand and know its gardens only from a book (and, what amounts to the same thing, several really exceptional web sites).

I found myself faced with a classic problem the other day, while buying a rose bush for a friend. It's just as well I didn't realize the grand metaphor forming over my head at the time -- the new spring roses had arrived, and it was hard enough to make choices while restraining enthusiastic overbuying. Finally, after much thought and trundling around from one end of the display to the other (and, if truth be told, a fair bit of muttering under my breath -- it's just as well I went to the nursery early; that way I didn't frighten other customers), the choice came down to a found Bourbon and the climbing form of Cecille Brunner.

The metaphor resides in the contrast between these roses' blooms -- there was my choice, which seems, on another scale, so often my choice in growing roses. It wasn't the plants themselves -- this bourbon shows china traces and the polyantha plants often show more affinity to the chinas than the multifloras to whom they are normally attached. The Bourbon's bloom is fairly large, loosely quartered (which means the middle is a muddle, so to speak), and richly fragrant. Cecille Brunner's flowers are small, exquisitely shaped (especially in the bud) with the high-pointed center of the modern hybrid tea, and without fragrance.

Being a gardener means oversensitivity to the seasons. I plan enthusiastically in the winter and spring, and grow happier and happier as spring plants revive and bloom or new plants establish themselves and grow. When hot weather hits and some plants falter, or weeds overgrow them, I lose interest, even wondering whether I should cut back the space devoted to the garden. As a hint of fall appears, the enthusiasm begins to revive with the proximate need to plant fall greens. And of course along with that one has to move plants here and there. (I don't often buy new plants in the fall.) At the same time, I suddenly want to get my writing/research life organized again, and I begin to think of new plans (not of course having come anywhere realizing the old ones).

The difference between a gardener and someone with plants in a landscape is that the latter wants a finished, static picture he or she doesn't have to worry about, while the former never lets the thing stand still: something always fails (pole beans, dwarf dahlias, rare or not-so-rare salvias), rain doesn't come, dogs dig, etc., and one has to think of ways around the problem: dig up the dahlias, remember to spray the pole beans next year, water, plant, stake, etc., to guide the dogs to areas they can mess up freely. Etc. And of course plant more roses (why didn't I think of that earlier?).

All of a sudden the birds are back. True, I put out seed for the doves again last weekend, but I had already seen a titmouse and noticed that the thistle seed is finally going down now that goldfinches have returned to feed regularly. Blue jays come around again, too, but I think they are irritated with the lack of sunflower seed (of course I should put some out after writing this). The goldfinches are lesser goldfinches, native here (as the name suggests, they are smaller than the northern type; they have more black in the wings, too). There are two types of doves: neither is the northern mourning dove, but one looks like a miniature version; the second, much larger type is the white banded dove, a striking native.

For two seasons now, the mockingbirds have chosen to nest in the hedge along the back fence. Considering how talkative they are, it is pleasant to see them get their comeuppance as they are harangued by their own infants.

Outdoors is exceptionally pleasant this morning. Lots of birds, clear sky, dry cool air. The mockingbird sings like a madman, and there are plenty of birds all around-- the usual doves, titmice, goldfinches, and small sparrows in a flock, but this morning also a warbler in the spanish oak and the sound, if not the sight, of a cardinal.

"The gardener learns (or at least perceives) that roses are far easier to take care of if the gardener can get right in among them." (One Man's Garden, p. 149)

Hah, hah. In my Ohio valley gardens, I grew rugosa roses. Really, it's much smarter to mulch them very, very well -- and out to a distance of three feet in all directions (because they will certainly spread that far) -- in which case one could ignore Mitchell's otherwise excellent advice. Or is it a warning? I have repented since, but in those older gardens I was always lazy about stepping stones as devices to work one's way into the back of a border without compacting the good garden soil needlessly. Instead, I tried to create beds narrow enough that one could always reach everything -- or else mulch well at the back so that one needed to reach only on a few occasions each year. The end result of this was an odd assortment of narrow walkways and beds, an arrangement I certainly found convenient but which required an unreasonable amount of upkeep (weeding, replacing mulch, etc.) and took a surprisingly large toll in square feet. Stepping stones would have helped in a few places. I now have a mix of "deep" and narrow beds -- the moral is that the former are good for large plants (mulched) and an assortment of smaller plants and stepping stones to front them, the latter are good for "fussing beds," the ones you visit every morning with tea cup in hand, where you just must get your hands in to pull out that stray weed under the burnet (salvia coccinea, etc.) and where, later, you pop out to get a leaf or two of sorrel to enliven a lunch sandwich.

"It is true, to an extent no beginning gardener will believe, that the beautiful effects of the garden are those of light falling on wonderful masses and details that come by luck, just in the nature of things." (One Man's Garden, p. 195)

Well, of course, one plants things, and then, in time, the wonderful effects of light happen. The point is that one may plant favorite plants, or experiment with new ones, or arrange beds for color or for texture, or position shrubs for their shapes, but light comes into play only when one is thinking of the quantities of it plants need (or need to avoid) to grow. Shade or sun, part shade, morning sun, etc. But the shifting effects of light -- or the effects of light in shifting seasons -- are free, among the best blessings in gardening because one doesn't have to think about them. Even birds take planning, if you want something more than house finches and starlings. But it takes nothing more than sitting outside with a cup of tea at 7:00 am (6:00 standard time) to see a half hour of reddish-gold light streaming into the little grove of live oaks at a low angle and transforming a place that through most of the day is in dappled shade -- and in some places rather more shade than that. That dappled shade itself is almost alive -- through the heart of the day, light changes constantly, as a dracaena (out for the summer) receives direct light for twenty minutes, then later a croton, then a potted rose.

Gardening would be much easier for me if I used drip irrigation, a method I heartily recommend to any and all who garden in south central Texas and places west. Well to the west, our conferes in Phoenix know better than to attempt growing anything except certified local desert natives without an irrigation system. Here we can get away without such apparatus for part of the year (that is, later fall, winter, and early spring), and so one is tempted not to bother. The piper is paid richly in August, so to speak, when some plants suddenly die and you discover, as I usually do, that the soil beneath them had not been so carefully worked, dug, and mixed as you thought. It is nearly impossible to grow the lovely coccinea salvias (or the familiar annual splendens types, either) without constant attention to watering. Doesn't matter whether the plants are in shade.

Despite all this good advice, I will not use a drip irrigation system myself. Watering gives me an excuse to go out in the yard and look around (a much nicer excuse than pulling weeds). I like to look closely at plants to judge how they're getting on and get their reactions to life outside. I like to know who is happiest in the hard days of late summer (or the cold days of late winter or the rainy days of fall or spring). I like to think about whether a corner of a bed looks the way it should, or whether some plants should be moved and new ones brought in whenever the planting season starts up again. I like to know if a plant really grabs my attention, if I want five of them in that bed rather than one.

How can you do that if all watering requires is turning a valve and going back inside for another margarita?