One year of gardening in a new state, so many impetuous plans and mistakes

[Note to readers: This post was originally published as a newspaper column exactly four years ago, on August 13, 2011. With impetuous gardeners, some things never change.]

I have lived in Moscow for one year, and am grateful to the gardeners here in northern Idaho who have encouraged me and given advice about plants that grow well here. Special thanks to the neighbors and passersby who try really hard to keep from laughing when they see me, dirt-splotched and sunburned, digging up and moving entire beds of flowers that I’ve planted in the wrong places.

In this first year, I’ve realized nearly every week how aptly I have named my column: The Impetuous Gardener. Impetuosity has carried me on its fierce wind to three nurseries in one morning and led me up and down each narrow nursery aisle. At each stop, I was wheeling a garden cart, and lovely flowers called “Buy me!” along the way. I also saw some dejected, brown-leafed plants on the clearance table and knew they needed rescuing. (This is why I no longer – ever – stop at animal shelters. Two big dogs and three cats are probably three animals too many at our house already.) I often arrive home with plants filling the cargo space and the floor of my little SUV. Only when I’ve unloaded all those flowers does the common-sense light bulb finally flicker on.

Late in the spring, I dug a new flower bed in a corner of our front lawn. My heart was in the right place, I think. I wanted to give people who walk by a lovely view of delphiniums, roses, snapdragons, and pansies blooming in the sun. The crabapple tree overlooking the new bed had not yet leafed out and thrown the new garden into shade for most of the day. Soon the delphiniums and roses were all but shaking their drooping leaves at me for planting them in that sunless bog.

I often walk past a spectacular English garden in our neighborhood and was invited inside the gates for a delightful tour with the owners. I was so inspired that I vowed to make my own English garden. Never mind that their gardens have taken more than thirty years and are still evolving. I bought more delphinium (and other) plants, dug a new bed in the front-yard sunshine, planted the new ones and transplanted the unhappy ones from the shade. This spurt of energy resulted in one small new garden, sweet, but not dramatic, lush, or even vaguely British. I’m also left with a scraggly, half-empty bed in the shade nearest the sidewalk and another lesson learned in impetuous gardening.

The neighbors' garden also helped me realize we needed a rose arbor arching over our own front walkway. I envisioned red and yellow roses climbing the white lattice, with twining purple clematis for drama. When I mentioned this excellent vision to my husband, he envisioned the heavy labor required to provide concrete footings to support the arbor.

Instead, we bought two light-weight white trellises for the backyard patio, one for the roses, and one for the clematis. (I had already bought the plants and then had the arbor fantasy, so we had to have something for them to climb.) The rose arbor will happen, but not this year – maybe not even this decade.

Being an impetuous gardener can seem like a benign addiction, and most of the time, it is. But, like all addictions, wanting to create beauty can have its dangers. To keep mine in check, I follow a few simple rules:

• I set a specific monthly budget for buying all things garden related – and I stick to it.
• I also never shop for plants with friends. How many of us have, hanging in the depths of our closets, a never-worn outfit that a former BFF assured us looked absolutely fabulous on us? My problem is that my new gardening friends really do know their plants. If they suggested that an acre of perennials would look absolutely stunning in our side yard, I would be tempted. So I shop alone.
• Most important, I live with a wonderful man who knows when to enable my tendencies and when to temper them with reality. Time is the pleasure and bane of impetuous gardening. Sometimes I forget that English gardens should not be planted in a weekend, but over decades of joy in the planning, choosing, planting and nurturing. If my gardens could pop up, lavish and complete in two days, they would have as little heart and soul as the plastic blow-up figures on lawns at Christmastime. In gardens, as in all things worth cherishing, heart and soul take time.