The Best Laid Plans Of Mice and Gardeners
 (Read 100+ times)
By Glory Lennon
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When we first built our home the yard was a blank canvas and I was the painter with brush in hand. Actually, it was a shovel, several hundred dollars worth of plants and a plan. I had only just heard of a rather intriguing concept called Mono-Chromatic Gardening. This is the idea of a planting bed devoted to one sole color. This sounded great! I could do this easily.
I wanted my back yard to be a testament to Mono-Chromatic Gardening. I planned the theme flower beds carefully, the evergreen, blue, red, yellow and white. I started with the evergreen picking mostly shrubs. We planted Azaleas, Rhododendrons, a golden false Cypress, an Arborvitae and two nice looking bushes we never learned the name of. But something was missing. The bed didn’t quite look right. It needed a focal point! So we planted a weeping cherry tree. No, it wasn’t an evergreen but it would be green in the summer so I thought it would be fine. That should have been my first clue but I never listen to the little signs.
In the red bed I planted a weeping flowering peach tree which has a magnificent showing every Spring of magenta blossoms. I also planted Sweet Williams underneath it. The red bed looked wonderful awash in pinks and reds.
The blue bed came next and I thought this one would be a challenge. I didn’t think I could find very many blue flowering plants so I took the expert’s advice and included purples. In the center was a tree Wisteria which would bloom lavender. My husband fell in love with it despite the hefty price tag and insisted we get it. We also got two bearded Irises, one a sky blue called “Ocean Pacific” and a purple and white swirled one named “Baltic”. The rest of the bed was filled with Columbines, Monks-hoods, Forget-me-nots, Periwinkle and Hyacinths.
The white flower bed has the prerequisite Daisy, Liatris, Glads, Lily-of-the-Valley, Cranesbill and Fountain Cherry tree.
The yellow bed was where I placed my glorious Scotch Broom which I loved when I saw it in bloom at the famous Dupont Estate Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square Pennsylvania. Its intoxicating scent and bright yellow flowers assured me success as did the Rudbeckia, Sundrops, Stella D’Oro Daylily and Daffodils.
So, there were my perfect little theme flower beds. At least, they were perfect for the first year but by spring the next year I had a rude awakening. The first surprise came in the blue bed. Somehow the Hyacinths weren’t the lavender blue I expected. They were pink. Pink? What the heck? They were labeled blue in the store. No big deal. I’ll just plant them in the red bed.
I waited and waited and waited for the Tree Wisteria to bloom. It never did. Ten years later and it still hasn’t bloomed. But you know what I discovered? The Tree Wisteria isn’t really a tree. Oh, no, it’s still a vine and takes every opportunity it can to revert back to a vine. It’s currently the bane of my existence. I have to prune out its suckers every few weeks to keep it in that tree form. Not a lot of fun.
At least the red bed wasn’t a disappointment. The Peach tree grew quickly and the sight of it in bloom was nothing short of magnificent. Unfortunately, it grew a bit too quickly. It’s label declared it was a small tree 12-15 feet tall at full height. They either lied or don’t know how to measure. Perhaps I feed it too well? Whatever the case, it grew to 25 feet tall and nearly as wide casting way too much shade on my Sweet Williams. Woe is me!
So, now what? The Williams were moved (the ones that survived) and replaced with Dragon’s blood Sedum, a shade tolerant Sedum with bright red flowers. Only problem there is, unknown to me, a yellow Sedum piggybacked onto my Dragon’s Blood Sedum and eventually took over and smothered its cousin. Survival of the fittest, I suppose.
The evergreen bed...well... wasn’t. In spring it was awash in bright pink on the Azaleas, orchid purple on the Rhodo, the Golden Cyprus would have looked more at home in the Yellow bed and that bush I never knew the name of turned out to be a Burning bush which turned flaming bright red in Autumn. And I was worried about the Cherry tree! That bloomed into a spectacular white cloud, by the way. So much for that.
The white bed looked promising until I discovered, to baffle the mind, Black-eyed Susans growing between the other plants. What in the world were they doing there and how pray tell did they get there? A wayward wind blowing seeds hither and dither, no doubt or birds which love to ‘help’ me in the garden in return for my feeding them. Oh, well.
I crossed my fingers for the yellow bed but alas, fate took a hand in that too. My precious Scotch Broom died after a brutal winter. At this point I was so depressed with my failure I gave up and planted a Pee Gee Hydrangea in place of the Broom which never did smell nearly as sweet as the ones at Longwood. So there I was with the Pee Gee’s white and pink blooms clashing horribly with the yellows.
At that point I was forcefully reminded of that old Robert Burns poem we all learned in tenth grade English class. “The best laid plans of mice and men always go awry”. That Burns guy really knew his stuff but I wish he had warned me that it’s doubly true for gardeners. Yes, I had all good intentions going into this Mono-Chromatic Gardening scheme but Mother Nature, fate, whatever, had other plans.
So, I learned to go ahead and make my not-so- precise garden plans, plant in not-so- neat little rows and not to trim those bushes so religiously. That way I won’t be surprised when things don’t go as planned.
You may be asking what has become of my theme flower beds. Well, they’re just flower beds now.
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Author Bio Box: Glory Lennon
 To find more on gardening visit
http://www.helium.com/user/show/32782.
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