Go With me on my Gardening Journey

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
January 21st, 2009
Filed in Garden Design
Tags: Compost, garden planning, gardening

My Ugly and Wimpy Garden this Winter

Yesterday, I talked to Chris.  It is always interesting, because he lives in the freezing cold wasteland of Canada (just kidding, Chris.  Love ya!) and I live in the (generally) warm and toasty North Carolina.  He gardens in the temperate plain region, and I garden in the coastal, humid south.  He comes at gardening from that of an interested homeowner.  I approach it as a cast-off public garden professional.  Together, we meet in the middle to creat one gardening personality of a fairly fanatical home gardener.

I need to adjust my Strategy

This afternoon, as I looked out the window at my forlorn and ugly garden, under its half-baked layer of snow, I decided that I need a change.  I had kind of already decided this yesterday when talking with Chris.  I approached my giant landscaping projet last spring with the gusto of a horticulture director at a public garden with a big budget!  I am still paying off that project.  I worked with the crew for 11 hours and we planted 30 azaleas, ten camellias, 15 roses, flats and flats and flats of annuals, and gallons and gallons of perennials.  All summer long, the garden was, well, pretty.  It wasn’t all that interesting, or spectacular.  It was “scrubbed clean pretty.”  It would have been at home in any little garden open to the public. But, it had no personality!  And, especially in the winter, when I could have a really interesting winter garden, and all I have is a sick looking bed of pansies.

The Difference between Work and Home

My garden here in Wilmington, NC, is the first garden I have cared for that is entirely my own.  Not my mother’s, not for my job, but just for my own fun, food production (coming soon) and beauty.  For the last ten years, I have spent my time planting tens of thousands of plants each season–all with someone else’s budget!  I gardened within their rules, their aesthetics and their time scale.  The two most recent gardens had fairly strict planting guidelines, so while I made the gardens pretty, they were not very creative.  The time has come, however, to break the chains of institutional gardening and embrace the individualism that is my backyard!  I need to stop shrieking at my husband if he brings home one of something, rather than 25.  I need to leave the garden center with one cart, not five.

This could be Interesting. . .

So, while I am a horticulturist with degrees and stuff, I am re-learning gardening as a hobby, not as a job or as a professional image.  Now that I write a lot about gardening, and think a lot about my own garden, I feel that I am finally starting to understand how different this will be, and how fun.

I just felt like I should say something to explain why I, as a so-called professional gardener and garden writer, could be writing about trying things for the first time and not sound like a phony.  I really am trying a lot of this for the first time, in one way or another–whether budget-wise, scale-wise, or climate-wise.  I don’t have a crew to construct things for me.  I don’t have a crackerjack IPM staff member to solve my riddles.  I’m doing it myself.  You might be saying, “Well, duh.  That is what the rest of us are doing.”  Think of it this way, though.  What is it like if you used to be a teacher, and you are now a sales manager and you go back for your kid’s parent-teacher conference?  What if you used to be a chef, but now you edit books, and you go back to your old restaurant?  It is a little weird.  Especially if you didn’t leave the profession of your passion entirely by choice.

What does this mean for you?

Well, nothing, probably.  You get to see me make mistakes so that you don’t have to. You also get to see how a little bit of botany and plant knowledge helps me with my home garden and how that knowledge could help you.  Hopefully, it just helps you get to know me better so that you know that what I write here is really from experience, not just a bunch of stuff I made up to fill the blog.  I look forward to all of the adventures!

–Katie

PS My house had no gardening or landscaping when I got it, so I guess something is better than nothing, but it could be better and will be!