This year I will have occupied my little postwar ranch for 22 years and it would be unrecognizable to the widow who sold it to me in 2000. The most notable change is the gardens which almost completely surround my half-acre slice of heaven. The house came with minimal landscaping: a rhododendron which had been poorly pruned into a shape resembling a lollipop, clumps of overgrown euonymus, a few sad privet and a massive barberry.
A fall closing meant I had the winter to plan and get the inside habitable, but the following spring I began gardening in earnest. A trench needed to be dug from the corner of the house out to the road for sump pump drainage and my first flower bed, the driveway garden, was established along that line; once I started I just kept going.
I had never had free reign to do a large flower garden before; for years my garden energies had been focused on large vegetable gardens which were fairly predictable and with which I had a lot of experience. Flowers and shrubs were more of a mystery, so I found myself poring over plant descriptions in search of things that would transform my yard into a garden paradise.
The description for sweet woodruff caught my eye: “an airy ground cover of crisp green whorls topped with sweetly scented flowers in the summer”. I thought it would make a nice cover for the sun dappled ground under trees so I bought it. It took a couple of years to get established, but once it did it began taking over everything. Weeds were happy to grow up through it and raking the fallen leaves at the end of the season proved to be a trial. It has been haunting me since and I suspect I will be adding it to the weed bucket for years to come.
A friend had a trumpet vine growing on a trellis, and as I sat in his yard one summer afternoon I was entranced by the hummingbirds jamming their heads into the orange tubelike flowers in search of nectar. I instantly knew I wanted to grow one, so I asked if I could have a cutting. He was reluctant, warning me to plant it on something sturdy as it had the potential to grow very large. I assured him that I knew what I was doing and took the section of root home. It flourished as invasives tend to do, and in two years it was as tall as the stockade fence. Not content with one stalk, it shot up several more creepers on the fence as well as popping up everywhere in the garden; it even found its way through a small crack on the edge of my blacktop driveway. In ten years it managed to completely destroy the stockade fence and I realized it needed to go, so chainsaw in hand I cut the fence into chunks with the trumpet vine firmly attached and hauled the pieces to the landfill. The fence has been replaced and errant vines continue to appear, but it is manageable now. Next time I will listen.
My most expensive regret was the purchase of a river birch to replace a mountain laurel that lived between the house and the driveway and succumbed to sapsucker damage a few years after I moved in. Also called heritage birch, I loved the bark which peeled off in large sections to reveal different shades of buff, cream and tan and the graceful branches. What I did not know is that it is the messiest tree in the universe, dropping fine, whippy branches on a more or less constant basis. At first I thought the tree was ill, but my master gardener aunt confirmed that river birches are messy things. To make matters worse, the tree dropped a fine, sticky sap nearly all summer long which was not noticeable when the tree was small but when it partially shaded the driveway my car would become fouled with it. One day I came out to see a large number of bees on my car enjoying the sticky goodness and I realized it was time to remove the tree.
The good thing about gardening regrets is that they are fairly easy to fix unlike some of the Big Life ones. But they still have the capacity to teach you things like patience, perseverance and the importance of doing your research.
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