The moist-garden returns

Despite ending a growing year, fall's dramatic changes prefigure the next garden iteration

In most places in the Northern Hemisphere, November is an inhospitable month that signals the beginning of winter’s icy grip. But here in temperate Victoria, November marks the end of one garden year and the start of another, forcing complex transitions on both garden and gardener. The mood can be rather somber, as this is the debut of our wet winter, bringing stretches of showery overcast skies and periodic downpours. By week three in 2009, it had already dropped over twice the average November rainfall, and still it came down. The run of rainy-grey days can feel psychologically confining, a depressive start to the season of ‘affective disorder’ where mood tends to be a drag on initiative. Driven by shortening days with lessening light, gloom eats further into the meagre intensity of fading daylight hours. Feelings of hopelessness can take root if this continues without breaks. Some lucky ones decamp for sunnier climes. In the event of no reprieve, consolations simply must be actively sought out.

A fire burning gamely in the grate is far and away the best counter to any signs of cabin fever, but there are some consoling aspects to the rains themselves. One is the welcome sound they make at night: a soft drumming on the roof, metal downspouts gurgling audibly with the runoff. Such sounds cause sleep to come more readily, drive it deeper and make it last longer for those hunkered safely in dry houses. Cloudy skies also darken the night hours, holding circadian rhythms at bay far longer. After the short nights and early starts of summer, whose short-slept habits trail on into fall, sleep is finally sustained and restorative. In longer stretches of wet, an urge to hibernate and slow the pace of life affords a certain pleasure – if we allow ourselves to give in to it! And while November is very wet indeed, even its dampest iterations offer some clearings, with reassuring rainbows and occasional sunny patches. And at such moments, where sun suddenly appears and moss on the oaks glows appreciatively, one is immediately reminded that seasonal chores await attention and finds that the energy for tackling them often readily returns. Sunlight has that sort of effect on gardeners.

Subtle November lights bring out pastel-tinted skies in cool, moist landscapes

Rainfall from November to February delivers the bulk of Victoria’s annual water supply, stored in our Sooke Lake reservoir as run-off from the surrounding hills. But feeling put upon by rain and with so much yet to come down, gardeners aren’t the least concerned about water storage at this point in the year. We’ll be more grateful when suddenly we need water for plants wilting from drought, as happens so rapidly when our climate swings dry. For this moist coastal paradise we inhabit rests on a perennial climate paradox: the illusion of verdure in winter, cast abruptly aside as late spring turns dry and green grounds fade suddenly to buff. Drought takes hold quickly, some years as early as late April, then stretches deep into autumn before the land greens up again. Landscape veers from lush spring plain to baked summer prairie in what seems a blink. Grasses retreat deep into their roots and only reappear when the fall rains entice them back, often far into October.

Dry summer landscape pallette: wheatstraw and caramel share space with arborial greens

This wet-dry climate triggers abrupt changes in the landscape, requiring adaptations on the part of gardeners. Fall rains intensify throughout November and continue into December, typically our wettest month. Experientially though, November often feels wetter than December, as it tends to be less punctuated by periods of open sky (2013 turned out to be an anomaly, more like December). Grey, dreary November can send even seasoned residents packing, in search of sunnier days to offset the blahs induced by contracting daylight hours. Despite November greyness, the return of greenery to lawns and the lush mosses and striking funghi that adorn the Garry Oaks stun the viewer when sunshine returns to the landscape. The plant world glistening moistly in brilliant sunlight is captivating. Even a dreary November sees sunny breaks, due to our fortunate geographic position within the Olympic Mountains rainshadow. Combined with a marine climate that moderates winter effects and keeps us mostly free of snow most winters, the rainshadow effect delivers many more sunny stretches here than either Vancouver or Seattle see. 

Sunny breaks in dreary November bring fall plants to life, here dust lichen tracing mortar bands

Come wet, grey November our climate more resembles that of England, easily fooling us into believing that the English garden is our proper design inspiration. It’s a powerful illusion, comforting psychologically, but a complete misfit ecologically in the long dry season to come. Not surprisingly, many do strive to model gardens here on rhodos, azaleas, hydrangeas, hostas and other exotics that need year-round moisture to really thrive. This choice is often to the detriment of plants and the dismay of admirers come June, when green exits the landscape with jarring finality and moisture-loving foliage flags and yellows. 
 

Winter colours, here thickets of native Nootka Rose

Not so the native, drought-adapted trees, like oaks, firs, big-leaf maples and the exotic arbutus, nor their natural understory of snowberry, Oregon grape, Indian plum, Nootka rose and ocean spray, which form pleasing thickets wherever we allow them space. Some gardeners do succeed in making facsimiles of English garden borders work tolerably well, abetted by sufficient moisture and mulch to keep their plants from burning out. But this is a running challenge that takes tremendous investments of time and resources to meet. If I’ve learned anything in my decades in a Victoria garden, it’s to fight neither site nor climate by preferring exotic choices. I will always hanker after hydrangeas, but in this climate on this site, the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze.

Berries add to the fall colour palette, warming the landscape

Yet, for five-to-seven months a year, depending upon seasonal variations, we do seem to be kith-and-kin of moist olde England and the traditional landscape park can seem a fitting Ur-garden. And this illusion intensifies in our moist coastal spring, which thanks to warm marine air comes early, advances exquisitely slowly, and in most years enables us to relish clear separation of the early, middle, and late varieties of many types of plants (among my favorites: quince, iris, lilac and peony, and simple versions of all the spring bulbs). This slow-release spring allows exceptional flowering complexity in our regional plant palette. Places that jump right into full spring from snowy winter, like my native Ontario, rarely see such a slowly unfolding panorama of blooms. 

Daffodils come early in spring, subject to adverse weather but reviving immediately it melts off

Early spring, daffodils, bergenia and quince provide flowering incidents in the greenery

And how England-like it is when the bulb clans launch their succession of cameo appearances, starting with aconites and inching into daffodils before going over-the-top in the colour-riot of tulips. Until end-April at least, occasionally as late as early June, we inhabit oak parklands carpeted in meadow flowers edged with shrubbery borders. Then ‘poof’, the grass suddenly dies, buff tones appear and we’re as bone-dry as southern California. This plunge, cold-turkey, into near-desert conditions is not for faint-hearted gardeners, and can only be countered by designing with more drought-tolerant plantings. There can be as many as six, and certainly not less than three and a half, months of parched conditions, during which many plants require watering regularly just to survive. On sites with thin, spare soils like mine, stunting is a possibility that stalks the garden. In such conditions it pays to minimize the number of plants needing their hands held day-to-day. Finally after the long months of dessication and watering, fresh rains effect our gradual return to greenery, culminating in these very November downpours just now weighing so heavily on my mood.

The dessicated landscape: beautiful, but not apt for gardening

November – hardly a promising garden month for getting outdoors – also sees the bulk of our annual leaf-fall on the wet coast. By end of week one in 2010, the Garry Oaks were already two-thirds finished shedding. By the end of week three, following several windy storms, they were pretty much done. Ditto 2013.  Individual specimens of sweet gum, big-leaf maple, and trembling aspen may hold their yellow, orange or crimson displays a while longer, but most leaves are down and carpeting lawns and beds, or piling up in wind-driven drifts in corners and crevices. This year there’s a bumper crop of deciduous leaves, courtesy of a long, moist, warm spring – a boon in the garden as leaves are the principal ingredient of fall compost that will be ready in time for dressing spring beds. But these same leaves can seem a bane when weather and lack of inclination prevent getting them cleared from the scene.

Towards end November, the oak leaves are all down and awaiting raking and composting

Twenty years ago the accepted wisdom here in Saanich was that you had no alternative but to burn the oak leaves. So fall typically gave rise to a prolonged period of mostly ineffectual burning –  or ‘smouldering’ to be more exact. People spent days on end stuffing paltry quantities of leaves into back-yard burners, only to release copious quantities of heavy grey smoke. It was widely held you couldn’t decompose oak leaves and that burning was the only effective means of disposal, belied by the choking results but mythically clung-to anyway. Wet leaves simply don’t burn well, period. Back then, many a November weekend was ruined by conditions far too smoky for working outside. Paradoxically and perversely, the few sunny times in a gloomy month were eclipsed by choking smoke.Today such fires are wisely banned in suburbia, there’s more knowledge of composting, and our enlightened municipality offers free curbside collection of piled leaves to anyone disinclined to work them on site. I myself rarely have spare leaves for Saanich’s pickup, but it’s a godsend for many!  To me it’s far too satisfying to return them as finished compost to waiting beds in early spring, and remarkably easy once you acquire the knack.

Saanich crew uses a leaf-vaccuum to collect all the leaves people push to the road edge

Recently, with weather fronts scrimmaging determinedly back and forth overhead, I felt frustrated by the gloomy persistence of showery overcast. Just at a point of despair, the clouds parted, sun appeared, and the idea of raking leaves moved from abstract burden to boon. Working outside, exposed to benign weather, on a productive task and at a congenial pace, to me offers a consummate enjoyment of gardening. Of course, nothing compares with a good outcome that evolves the overall composition. But everyday gardeners tend to see their creations more while beavering away at them than as the leisured observors of finished wholes described in garden books.  No matter, we finally get to be out in it, making it, enjoying the creative act of tweaking the next edition. 

Raking is a prelude to a more thorough pruning and tidying that brings out garden structure

 

Form re-emerges, the bones of the garden appear in sharper relief

The ground now is often too sodden for many garden activities – often the soil is simply too damp to work. Bulb planting and division for next spring’s early show have ideally been done long before it gets so wet. I say ‘ideally’ because I rarely get to this in a timely way, so find myself waiting and waiting for clear patches to drain soils sufficiently for planting, which hardly optimizes results. But raking leaves on wet lawns is far more feasible, so long as one has water-proof boots ready to hand. Duck boots with warm felt inserts are prized by wet-coast gardeners!

Moss that recedes to a brown rind in summer bulks up and returns to green with fall rains.

Spattered flecks of lichen

The return of the rains and lessening of sun intensity revives a plant realm that should be welcome in our gardens (if not on our roofs and lawns): a complex ecology of mosses, lichen and other plants that adds texture and subtle coloration to rock outcrops and tree limbs. Contracted to a mere rind for the long summer drought, moss is a sponge that bulks up quickly with rainfall while adding a unique aerial dimension to the return of greenery. Moss serves as a green backdrop for the emergence of tiny mushrooms and lichen, coating tree trunks and limbs with a glowing aura when sun immediately follows rain.  Powder or dust lichen appear as spattered flecks on oak trunks or spread themselves extensively on rock outcrops and stone walls, preferring spots that offer sun and damp in a vertical plane. These subtle plants add depth to the return of fall’s colour palette: aquas, greeny-blues, mustard yellows, burnt orange and off-white. They comprise a mysterious world involving complex and poorly understood dependencies with hidden algaes and molds, one I won’t pretend to understand but whose presence adds elegance and dimension to the fall/winter garden. If a garden offers them suitable habitat like rocks and Garry oaks, they will gradually occupy it as naturally as they do our wilder spaces.

Colonies of crepe-like funghi and lichen adorn moist specimen rocks

I’ve been known to select a rock with an embryonic lichen colony to place among new stones and confer a sense of belonging and long habitation to a new garden wall. There are over 1300 species of lichen identified in B.C., classified into orders by their form: dust, crust, scale, leaf, club, shrub and hair. Lichen proliferate widely in wilderness areas but have more difficulty surviving urban conditions. Suburban gardens with rock outcrops and native species are more amenable milieu to them. Because these plants exercise a subtle effect, they don’t leap to the eye with showy display but rather require a viewer’s discerning attention in order to be seen. Noticing algae, funghi, lichen and mosses is for me an active part of the return of ‘looking’ in fall – that facility of becoming able to see the garden anew and imagine fresh possibilities. Because these plants emerge at exactly the moment our deciduous trees are losing their annual growth and heading for winter dormancy, they embody a sense of fresh possibility and signal that the annual cycle is beginning once again. 

A strange world of plants that are extensive but are not erect or showy

Tidying and ordering the garden scene – however fleeting the effect in stormy November where the next event buffets and rearranges everything – brings visual clarity to our arrangements. One begins to see the garden anew, as if it were being inspirited once again, and from here one can again look forward and visualize how it will be come spring. For it’s against this backdrop that spring’s changes will pencil themselves gradually into the landscape. The garden’s bones – its paths, walls, steps and the plants used deliberately to shape spaces – come into sharper relief with the tidying and pruning, unified by the returning greenery. Garden objects made to recede by blankets of leaves and fall litter suddenly rise to the eye as context is restored. A feeling of repose and fitness returns to the scene.

The bones of the garden re-emerge after leaf-fall

Snow makes structure even more evident

Pruning is another activity awaiting rainless breaks. Some of summer’s departed luxuriance is yet to be pared back – shrubs like lavender, santolina, and rosemary all benefit from being pruned to shape, gaining in longevity what they lose in bulk; boxwood responds positively to a tightening of its form; spent flowers need to be removed and many perennials cut off at the soil. All this clipping and pruning effects a return of underlying structure, buried from spring on by waves of fresh growth and flowery exuberance, bringing simplicity back to the fore, which is further resolved by the return of green and the freshening of colour appreciation it begets.

Maple leaves edge a woodland path

Raking leaves stands as one of my absolute favourite ways of working in the fall garden. With deciduous trees it really cannot be avoided anyway, so we may as well learn to enjoy it. Raking lends itself to rhythmic movement, the tines of the rake sending swaths of leaves fluidly into lines and piles. A good metal rake is indispensable if one’s to get lost in the exercise. I see people awkwardly struggling to do this job with the rigid plastic rakes so common nowadays. No wonder they’d rather avoid it! Fighting the tool is never fun. Rigid plastic simply isn’t springy enough for this task, making it something more endured than enjoyed. If you have a plastic rake, ditch it right now and go find yourself a classic metal-headed, wood-handled rake. One with a spring across its back, to give you some twitch when you send the leaves towards your pile. Choose a width that fits the spaces you’ll be working in; too wide and you won’t find it convenient enough to use. A small hand rake is also useful for clearing beds and crevices. You’ll be amazed what a difference quality makes, how much more control over the action you develop, how much more gets done in a given time! With developing skills your metal rake will soon give you access to a workspace that’s known in artistic circles as ‘flow’. Flow is that coveted frame of mind where skills, purpose and ambient conditions come together to achieve outcome and provide enjoyment. The space known as flow can be cultivated, just like the garden itself. In time you’ll find yourself immersed in the activity, body and rake working as one, dancing the leaves along.

Leaf fall (sweet gum) coupled with fresh greens creates striking contrasts in the moist garden

The ultimate reward of raking is the store of raw material accumulated for fresh compost making. In clearer periods, I’ll moisten the caramel-coloured oak leaves with the hose, coat them lightly with damp soil and blend in the clippings from our fall tidying of beds and shrubberies. The wet soil scuffs the leaves, opening their surface for ready invasion of organisms and breakdown. This labour of compost-making is among the most satisfying and enjoyable a gardener knows – easy to do, but not to be hurried. Now it’s a matter of aligning your free time with breaks in the weather so compost can comfortably be worked up. Taking it slowly and methodically, establishing a rhythm with watering, mixing and piling, is the ideal way to make compost.

Mossy oak branches tinged with frost bathed in sun

Composting uses natural agents to break down organic materials. Because I don’t have the nitrogen-rich materials to create a hot compost (best for killing weed and other seeds and for breaking down the tougher materials), I’m building one that will work using the cooler forces of decomposition. I try to keep seeds out of it entirely, and not to inadvertently introduce plant roots that could re-establish themselves in the heap. My goal is to make a tempting hotel for worms and the many micro-organisms that will, over the ensuing months, consume every scrap of green kitchen and garden waste we care to mix in. Forget buying compost ‘starters’, they’re absolutely unnecessary. It’s a matter of getting the right ratio of green and brown materials, coupled with soil and moisture. You bias your pile via composition towards hot or cool; it’s a conscious choice with implications for who/what consumes the edibles on offer. Available nitrogen is the decisive determinant; if you have little, you are running a cold heap. Once made, your pile largely takes care of itself. You can make quite adequate compost heaps with just soil and carboniferous materials, adding the green component with kitchen scraps and garden clippings over time.

You can rely on your heaps to recycle everything from the kitchen that’s not fat, meat, or a dessert leftover. The trick is to establish the pile with a good balance of materials and moisture, making it a virtuous cycle. Then it’s ready to take as much green material as you care to throw into it, with only occasional forking-over. I feel that whether you do or don’t create a formal bin to contain your compost is a site- and person-specific choice. You can keep it as simple as building a pile directly on the ground, which is what we do. You may need to cover it with something to protect the nutrients from rain, but be careful that your cover doesn't tempt rodents to nest there! When it comes time to fork your heap over (a natural accelerant), a pile on the ground is the most convenient to deal with. Box and bin or drum structures make it more awkward to fork things over, mix and aerate. A pile accessible from all sides is most efficient, and can easily be remixed by forking it along a couple of feet. This is especially true when you have large volumes of material, like the leaves from dozens of Garry oaks.

Pacific Madrone's peeling bark layers glow cinammon-red when saturated in fall and winter

More time is spent raking and tidying in November than in compost making. As I rake along I often find myself contemplating the challenges and opportunities offered by the winter months. Hardest of all is the adaptation to shorter days and grey, wet conditions. Yet to say ‘grey’ is to sentence November to a kind of dreary monotony that belies the beauty revealed at particular moments. Grey light can indeed be cheerless and cold, but it can also convey monochrome subtleties to a discerning eye. It’s visually refreshing after summer’s busy colour competition to see the world in a more restrained palette. Unexpectedly, sunshine appears, and monochrome gives way to lush greenery set off by glistening fall berries, glowing mosses, or saturated barks.

A mossy oak with deeply fissured bark lends a sense of great age to a garden.

Cotoneaster and pyracantha are the main berrying plants in my bungalow garden and around the entire region, colouring up in cooler autumn weather. But many plants berry or hip, from roses and ornamental crabs to hawthorn and holly. The berry crop, though restrained compared with summer flowering, distantly echoes its abundance. Deep reds, oranges, and yellows predominate, but delightful cranberries, corals and burgundies also show against glistening greens. 

Late fall end of day light reduces the world to elemental composition

Fall is a subtle, melancholic, but quite beautiful time in a westcoast garden, a season that may well prompt reflection on life’s glories and mysteries, its short course and potential for renewal. One could call it the Buddhist season par excellence, because things are briefly in balance and awaiting change. Berries on shrubs are emissaries and tokens of the annual cycle of growth and decay and rebirth, themselves the vehicle of new life. They’re a reminder to creative gardeners of the possibilities of planning garden events to occur across four distinct seasons. And in many cases they form an invaluable food store for the over-wintering birds that descend on them in waves at various points.

Near-surreal redness glowing in a moment of brilliant November sunshine

Subtle colour harmonies between rock, leaves and berries, set up by a recent shower

Overall, wet fall returns a balance and simplicity to the garden that’s satisfying to contemplate. After relentless chasing of new growth in spring, and the ensuing retreat from heat in summer, fall offers a welcome return of feelings of repose in the garden. Repose might best be described as a placid, serene, and peaceful feeling that is highly esteemed by creative gardeners. It’s the opposite of loud, showy, bright, metallic, and harsh effects. Feelings of repose are amplified when garden choices feel as if they belong as placed, where harmony of relationship exists among elements. In fall, with feelings of repose rising, it becomes possible to think anew about garden designs, to reflect on the experience of the past year, and to slowly draw conclusions: what themes to emphasize, plants to replace, structures to create, or effects to amplify next year; to consider the bones and axes, the steps and stairs, along with the greens of spring as a backdrop to flowering incidents. The rub is simply that most of the changes one would like to effect can’t be made until soils drain sufficiently for easy working. But fall’s slackening rhythms predispose the mind to return to musing about what a garden could be, an integral part of creative engagement in designing and maintaining one. Finally there’s no rush to complete tasks (except for the leaves). How fine, if infrequent in harried lives, to curl up on a couch with a blazing fire and let a garden text loft the mind into imagining what might be next year. Briefly the would-be creative-gardener trumps the slave to garden tasks, and possibilities can be imagined anew. Some part of gardening involves dreaming and imagining what could be; fall turning wintry sees the return of that desire to conjure more definite ideas as to what the garden could become, to aspire to shape one’s own anew.

Even monochrome light in November has its beauty

Fall also portends a return to reading as further stimulus to imagining next year’s avant-garden. I find reading about gardens and plants nearly impossible in summer heats – particularly as garden labour reduces itself to the watering of specimens, dead-heading of plants, and the removal of spent materials to the compost staging area. Come fall the survival imperative governing summer can be forgotten, a most welcome evolution. Come fall, green spreads itself anew throughout the landscape. And with fresh green comes new imagining, conditioned by the current year’s experience, but leavened by the exotica of thoughts captured in books. I’ve been enjoying browsing several books this fall, but I’ll leave that side of it to a future posting. Meantime, I’ve got to pick the oak leaves out of my fish-bone cotoneasters, to prevent them creating habitat for webworms next spring! And after that, the compost heap awaits my attentions. 

Sure hope it doesn’t rain!

The Inspired Garden



California poppies supplying their own sunshine in this burnt orange cluster growing wild along the Galloping Goose trail. Like digitalis, they move themselves around.

I'm writing this on day three of summer solstice, the time of year when we get the maximum of daylight hours. By rights we should be enjoying long warm evenings out-of-doors, but in the cool 'Junuary' weather we're having, as often as not evenings are spent inside, if not hovering near a heater. The plants, however, oblivious to our complaining about vile weather, are quietly enjoying moist soils and moderate temperatures, giving us long flowering and lush foliage. Their floral display offers at least some consolation for our feelings of abandonment by the sun.

This time of year so many things are blooming in tandem, from mop-headed peonies to blazing poppies to cool blue ceanothus, and so many more readying themselves in the wings, that it's rather arbitrary to single out any one plant out for promotion. And yet, I just have to sing the praises of one humble cottage garden plant that's a favourite performer, reliably adding its unique character to our late spring gardens. I'm talking about foxgloves (or digitalis).

Foxgloves bloom along a tallish spike, in a range of magenta-pink and clear white colours.

Frequently an uninvited garden guest, showing up unbidden after soils are dug over or winds disperse their tiny seeds far and wide, foxgloves lend charm with their novel vertical presence. Should they appear in your garden, afford a few of them a smallish footprint and they'll reward you next year by stretching upwards and ‘inspiring’ novel effects. In the flowering portion of their cycle, at their maximum height, foxgloves claim a realm that's typically unused unless occupied by the more permanent shape of a shrub. Unlike shrubs, after flowering (and with a little help) they retreat to a base that's compact and recede into the background.

Should they fail to arrive spontaneously, you have only to scatter a few seeds where you think you think they might contribute to the scene. The common foxglove (digitalis purpurea) is absolutely the best in my view, as it's an easy-care, drought-hardy plant - but I must admit my bias towards the less-bred, more-common varieties of plants. Not uniquely though, as I can sometimes be seduced by a plant that's well-bred too!



A range of blush magenta tones show up spontaneously, with dark-purple spots inside.

Foxgloves are to my eye the perfect plant for gaining vertical effects from a compact space – they will tuck quite handily into small niches. Sometimes this dwarfs them a bit, but what matters to me is the effect in a given situation. Most of our gardens are not huge, and they tend to fill up because we're such collectors, so space is often at a premium.

These magenta-pink or white-flowered biennials (with varying blush tones in between) send spires as high as six feet from their compact rosettes. Elegant as singles, they also cluster well in small groupings. Foxgloves add vertical dimension to the garden, sending their spikes up into airy voids and draping them in elegant, delicate flowers.

Unpredictably, some foxgloves are clear white. Here a volunteer attains its full height of six feet.

Foxgloves feel 'old-fashioned' because they've been around for such a long time, valued both ornamentally and medicinally in Europe. Additionally, they are great attractors of bees, butterflies, and most dramatically, hummingbirds, who love their nectar. Bees delve so deeply inside their tubular blooms as to disappear entirely from view. Foxglove flowers open slowly along the main stem, advancing from below and setting seed in sequence as petals drop off. With enough moisture, they’ll easily give more than a month of continuous bloom.

I rate all plants on the fussiness scale before making choices, but these hardly register. They're easy to look after because they don't mind thin soils or lack of nutrients, and they have the compelling knack of growing in some of the most unpromising locales. They also like acidic soils, which makes them apt for southern Vancouver Island with its coniferous forests.

Our damp cool June has prolonged flowering and relieved us of the need to water.

Foxgloves are notorious self-sowers, which in a positive vein provides gardeners with opportunities to exploit their spontaneously chosen placements (shades of Norah Lindsay!). At one level, once present in your garden, tending them involves little more than watching where they germinate and then saying yay or nay. Yes you have to control their seed dispersal, but you retain the power to edit where they've landed, keeping only those that you feel add to your composition.

Foxgloves in a cluster, with colour variations, displayed against a perfect foil of blue ceanothus.

Foxgloves are an introduced plant (ie. not a native species) that has naturalized across large parts of North America. We need to bear in mind they can be space invaders, appropriating habitat from native species quite efficiently and therefore posing a threat to the viability of other plants along forest edges and logging roads. Their seeds remain viable for a very long time and lay dormant in the soil awaiting opportunity. This is not a threat in gardens where space is closely controlled, but it is a compelling reason not to be nonchalant about their seed.

Flowering up their stem, they set tiny seeds in pretty capsules that belie their power to spread. 

To put this as a warning: foxgloves are lovely, but don't let them run amok, or they will! It’s necessary to deadhead these plants after flowering in order to control their prodigious seed output – failing that, they’ll be everywhere. And, the earlier you do the deadheading, cutting the stem back to the rosette, the more likely they are to bloom again the following year. Note though that they are biennial, flowering in the second year after germination. And here on the wet coast, they can sometimes be coaxed to be a perennial, which if they've located themselves choicely, is a real asset.

Once at home in your garden, new plants will assuredly appear, because some seed scatters during the deadheading no matter how careful you are. If these self-chosen sites aren't where you want them, they're easy enough to lift and transplant during fall when plants are becoming dormant, or in early spring when soils are moist. Just remember, they don't bloom the first year - so be patient and avoid disappointment. Indeed, forget you ever transplanted them (easy enough if you're busy) and then enjoy the sense of surprise when their rosettes begin to perk up and fresh spires reach skywards.

Late in the evening, on a rare sunny day, western light floods into the garden illuminating foxglove spires.

Digitalis thrive in partial sunlight to deep shade, making them even more useful in the parts of gardens less drenched in sunlight (which is all of our gardens this season!). However, they will also tolerate full sun, so they are truly versatile performers. The name digitalis means 'thimble', referring to the shape of their flowers, as apparently does the 'glove' in foxglove. They do happen to be poisonous, so don't ingest them unless prescribed by a doctor (likely as digoxin, a common heart medication derived from digitalis).

As I've wandered about observing my own foxgloves, going strong from early June well into the new solstice, I've also noticed several other self-seeding plants that are blooming: campanulas, for example, overlap the foxglove season and are going full bore right now. They are overlapped in turn by the grey, felt-leafed Lychnis (another cottage-garden stalwart), just now inching into their time of glory. Both of these share foxglove's ability to self-seed, so beware of expansionist tendencies, but they like to gradually extend their domain in one locale more often than packing up and moving home holus bolus in the manner of foxgloves. In any case, you the gardener retain the power to edit and have the final say over where these mobile spikes of colour appear. I enjoy the fact that once sown, these plants will do most of the rest of the work all by themselves.

There are many types of campanula moving around: this I believe is Canterbury Bells, a volunteer in my garden.

 

Full-tilt spring





View of garden shed with bluebells as a foreground, in early May. Spring carpeting comes at a price: every flower sets seed.

Welcome to the Seasoned Gardener, offering images from a westcoast bungalow garden and reflections on its seasons, days and moods. Seasoned Gardener refers to garden design that's apt for site and season, but also to the effects of time and insight on choices in the garden and, more ironically perhaps, on its gardener. Mostly I want to share some impressions of what's going on as the seasons here unfold, capturing some of the magic of the moment.

I've been involved with gardens one way or another for most of my life, first as a simple maintainer, starting long before I had any inkling that there even were ideas and ways of thinking about gardens or gardening. My mother brought about the connection, conscripting me early on to help with outdoor chores on a largish corner lot. Hers was a simple perimeter garden with foundation plantings along the streetfaces of the house. There was a fair bit of lawn, several large, weedy Manitoba maples providing some shade in the back, and quite a few shrubs, including lilacs, plus a cherry tree, and a spindly apricot tree growing against a south wall, where it fruited readily. I remember that my mother always enjoyed being outside in her garden - it was a treat after dwelling in apartments to have outdoor space to enjoy, and she loved tending plants.

I cottoned quickly to jobs like mowing and edging, and to the raking, clipping, bundling and removal of debris that comprises so much landscape management. I learned to enjoy working out of doors with hand tools, especially operating a push mower, and I came to really like the look of a garden that's what I call kempt. (Literally, kempt means 'combed', but to me kempt means tidied and to a degree trim; a kempt garden is one that seems to be in a kind of visual balance, neither overrun nor overgrown, implying it's actively cared for by someone.)



Contrasty shadows reveal intense spring light, capable of bolting the garden into hyper-growth (the oaks are only partially leafed out at this point). It jumped from cool to 28 degrees in a blink!

 Because I moved around the country quite a bit as a younger adult, I didn't set down roots or have the experience of caring for an ongoing garden for many years. Then, a quarter century ago next year, I chose to make Victoria, B.C. home and was lucky enough to find a heritage house on a characterful lot with a remnant Garry oak meadow. The combination of a house in a setting it was designed for seemed idylic to me. The moment I saw this house-in-a-landscape combination, my garden imagination was stirred by possibilities. I didn't know that what I was about to take on was a bungalow, nor that it once belonged to a local architect, nor that it was built in 1913 in a time of economic optimism that was about to abruptly end. I just loved the feeling of the place in its setting high on the rocks.

This first posting comes as spring is going full tilt, when literally everything that grows is bursting with life around us. The Garry oaks were pretty much fully leafed out by the end of May, adding their green canopy to the scene. This is also a time of exploding floral display set off by a backdrop of spreading spring greenery. I've come to love this fleeting period when the greens are differentiated subtly into many gradations - it's a time when the eye is astonished by the way colours pop up against a lush green background. But this is also a time when things move along at a pace, picking up speed; and when we get stretches of heat and no rain, growth rapidly overruns boundaries and borders, and only ongoing interventions keep things from falling into early disarray.



A fellow gardener and I were talking about the sense of panic that comes with all the emerging visual splendour - weeds, great opportunists that they are, grass, and shrubs all grow by the hour in these ideal conditions. Gardeners whose personal labour is the sole source of organized pushback are made weary chasing after rampant growth. Lawns need cutting, shrubs need shaping, and weeds need pulling, at the same time that plants need feeding, soil conditioning, and if there's no rain, everything needs watering.

Doesn't take much sunny weather to make the watering can a necessity.

It's a rather cruel irony that the most exquisite period in the new garden cycle comes with impossible demands for labour and attention. It tends to make devoted gardeners slaves to their creations for a time - yet it's done willingly by fools like me. I remind myself it's important at times to simply enjoy being outside - taking time for tea on garden bench of an afternoon, wandering about witnessing floral incidents in the soft light of lengthening evenings, or following the robin's enthusiastic worm-hunting in moist grass at first light.

Whether you garden or are just a garden watcher, spring is an exciting time because so much is happening and the tempo is accelerating. To a gardener, it reveals the outcome of planned changes and prior interventions. Spring also brings about a welcome renewal, as plants burst into blooms that gardens host and orchestrate as sequences. The eyes are fresh and ready to be entranced after the long dormancy of winter. With planning, luck, and a good watering can, the progression of blooms can last well into fall, and even, in the form of berries, endure into winter.


Westcoast spring often moves slowly, with grey rainy days that gardens love. Snails like the moisture too.

So this is a first post in what I hope will be a chronicle of events in a garden knitted between a landscape and a bungalow, which itself will celebrate 100 years of human habitation in 2013. The landscape is antique, dating at least to the last ice age when retreating glaciers left the rocky outcrops with grooves etched into smoothed surfaces. The oaks came much later, but have been there a long time too in human terms, despite being somewhat stunted by the dry, thin soils they subsist on. The gardener is, well, 'seasoned', if only in the sense of long experience, and always enjoys the return of spring.

The spring garden is a culmination of many things - the changing progression of the weather, the stage of development, the choices made the previous year by both gardener and nature. After the austere dormancy of the garden in winter months, spring is a leap into movement that first ambles, then sprints and then at some point, turns into a luge ride. Then all we can do as gardeners is hold on, water as needed, and perhaps steer a little towards fall, when the pace again slows and things return to a state of repose.

Alright then, it's back to work. It's just June and there are bluebells needing deadheading before they set their dastardly ample seed!