By Sharon Cohoon, Sunset senior garden writer
Jim gave you his hard truths of gardening yesterday -- a riff inspired by the editor's page in a recent issue of Fine Gardening. Now here's mine:
• You’ll never get to grow everything you’re curious about in one short lifetime.
• Dead plants aren’t tragedies; they’re opportunities. They create an opening to try something new. I’ll make an exception for trees, though. Losing a tree breaks your heart.
• Garden writers may get tired of seeing them, but there’s a reason designers keep using things like New Zealand flax and French lavender over and over again. They don’t fail. I guess that’s why they call them landscaping staples.
• Flowers, from a design standpoint, are non-essential--throw pillow equivalents. It’s foliage that makes the garden. Or, as a former Sunset garden writer once put it, “Buying a plant for its flowers is like choosing a wife for her bonnet.”
• Growing edibles is like raising children; if you don’t pay attention to them on a regular basis, they turn out badly.
• If you’re traveling, see a plant you’re tempted by that’s new to you, and don’t buy it, you’ll never find it again.
• If you’re traveling, see a plant you’re tempted by, buy it and tote it home, you’ll see it in your local nursery the next week. Especially if you carried it home on a plane.
• Widely spaced paving stones with a tapestry of ground covers between them always look charming in photos, but don’t go there. Spending hours weeding where you walk is dumb. Attempting this look is the worst garden decision I ever made.
• Plants like being in the ground, not in pots. Or am I the only one with a black thumb when it comes to container gardening?
• Wild gardening ideas—like painting your block wall a dark red—usually turn out to be the best ones. But finding the courage to try them out never gets easier.
• Hand modeling and gardening are incompatible activities. Respectable is the best I can expect from my nails. Barely presentable is more likely.
• If you can’t kill a snail with your bare hands, you’re not a gardener. Judy Wigand, a former boutique nursery owner and gardener extraordinare, told me that. Frankly, it never occurred to me to try before her comment, but, after the first one it’s easy. Even gratifying. And perhaps helps explain the condition of my hands. (See above.)
