Garden Capers

The Insane Gardener

As a Horticultural Therapist and Master Gardener, I'm familiar with the therapeutic benefits of gardening. Designing and implementing therapeutic, sensory, stroll, meditation and vegetable gardens for relaxation, and physical, mental and spiritual recovery is a rapidly growing professional practice. Despite the benefits, I can't ignore the dark side of gardening.

Garden Capers includes professional and personal information on a variety of garden-related subjects including those that drive a gardener crazy: the sound of deer munching on hostas at 2 a.m., squash vine borers, killer fungus, plants out of place, no rain, too much rain, and stealthy, tricky critters-deer, armadillos, chipmunks and people.

Cautionary tales about the poor choices gardener's make will also be included. For example, gardeners shouldn't live in a habitat where armadillos can survive the winter and they should never, ever volunteer their gardens to be on a public garden tour two years in a row.

Garden Capers offers tour highlights: I attended an annual garden tour to Hilltop Farms, a commercial nursery that allows the public through its hallowed doors in the spring. Hilltop offers a cash discount. As a member of Plants Anonymous, I limited myself to twenty-five dollars. Our group had two hours to shop. I chose my plants in seventeen minutes and spent the remaining time watering flowers with drool.

I was tempted to break off a little bit of this plant or perhaps a little bit of that one and take it home to root like a certain member of my family, who carries a Ziploc in her purse for such occasions. I decided not to snitch a snip because the one time a piece of an incredible cultivar of sedum (which had fallen on a path in Abkhazi Garden in Victoria, BC) planted itself in my garden in Missouri, it died three days later. My two established ice plants beside the snitched sedum also died. Mother Nature has a wicked sense of humor.

Photo: Abkhazi Garden Victoria, BC