Beginner's Garden #3

The Beginner's Garden, Phase 3

1. Your Plants

The plants you've gotten for your just-give-it-a-try garden beds have worked well for me in terrible conditions. That is to say they worked in New York City parks. The soil was not great, I couldn't get back to weed or water regularly, and yet these plants prevailed, when not stomped on or stolen.

You didn't get plants with huge showy flowers. No hibiscus. No roses. Some bloom, but I hope that growing these plants will lead you to appreciate foliage as well as flowers. In my first years of gardening all I wanted were striped petunias, fragrant coral roses, and bright pink peonies. (And good tomatoes.) Slowly I evolved from flower mania to leaf love. Highly evolved gardeners get excited, and I am not making this up, about stem color.

Love your flowers, but also note the humble lamium, the small foreground plant for the shade garden, which has leaves with a metallic sheen. Hosta is grown for its amazing leaves—corrugated, broad, bold, patterned—rather than the modest spike of flowers. You will get to notice the contrast of feathery achillea foliage against the smooth leaves of the echinacea next to it. Same for the delicate, divided leaves of astilbe and ferns paired with those broad hosta leaves.

Your plants, leafy or flowering, have a really good chance of survival because of your preparation. They got a thorough watering—they started off in a quagmire, in fact. That wasn't just to give the plants a drink; it was also to get the soil in good contact with the roots.

2. Your Lack of Fertilizer

A couple of you have asked why no fertilizer. The compost and manure you mixed in to the soil will provide enough nutrition for all these plants as well as make the soil lighter and better able to hold water. And with any luck the enhanced soil and regular moisture will attract earthworms to do the fertilizing for you. Also, the sunny garden plants—echinacea, yarrow, rudbeckia, coreopsis—are American prairie natives and prefer lean conditions. Fertilizer would make them tall and leggy and more leafy than flowery.

3. Your Mulch

Why did your small garden get a bag of mulch? For starters, mulch spread on the soil will discourage weeds. Also, mulch keeps the plant roots cooler in the summer and slows the drying out of the soil, so you'll be able to water less often. And as the mulch breaks down, it adds small bits of organic matter to the top layer of the soil.

You refrained from pushing the mulch up around the crowns and stems of your plants because a turtleneck of mulch would make the bottom of the plant damp and airless, breeding fungal infection, a sort of botanical athlete's foot. (I have an arborist friend who carries garden gloves in his back pocket so that he can scooch mulch back from the bottom of street trees or plant stems. He does this on his way to dinner or the movies. And even on first dates.)

Agronomists say that all life on earth depends on a few inches of topsoil. The microscopic and small creatures that chew up soil litter make the nutrients available to plants. The plants then keep us alive. By adding compost and manure you've done a bit to improve one small parcel of topsoil.

4. Watering and Weeding

Your main duties, now that the hardest work is over, are watering and weeding. Water about once a week unless there has been pouring rain. (A half-hour-long shower isn't enough.) The month of May, you will notice, is the month of the dandelion. Pull them up now before they develop deep roots. Ditto with crabgrass.

5. Deadheading

One of the easier garden tasks is to snip off faded flowers and yellow leaves. If the leaf is yellow, it's not helping capture the sun's energy through photosynthesis. Deadheading, the name for flower-snipping, isn't just about tidying up. It affects plant behavior. When a flower has faded and ripened into a seed head, the plant believes (as much as plants have belief) that it has fulfilled its reproductive purpose, which means there's no need to make more flowers.

The sunny gardener's coreopsis and nepeta have such small flowers that deadheading them one by one would be tedious. To shear back after the first flush of blooms, hold a handful and snip off all the flowers.

Astilbe, in the shade palette, is the one exception to the deadheading rule. One set of spikes per season is all you get. Some gardeners, and some birds, find the brown dried seed heads attractive. This is the plant for which moist soil is most important. Drought, especially in July and August, makes that ferny foliage turn crispy. Astilbes are tough, though. Cut them to the ground and fresh foliage will come back.

6. Hosta, Lady Ferns, and Impatiens

Some gardeners prune off all the flower stalks on hosta, since the plants are grown for their big showy leaves. If a leaf is damaged by a late-spring frost, trim it off, and the plant will send up fresh growth. The one drawback of hosta is its attractiveness to slugs. Along the foggy parts of the West Coast, the leaves end up Swiss-cheesed. The mascot of the University of California at Santa Cruz is the banana slug.

The shade gardeners' athyrium, or lady fern, comes from North American woodlands. All the fern books say it's relatively easy to grow. "If lady fern has a disadvantage, it is that the fronds may become tattered and blotched in late summer," writes Steven M. Still in his Manual of Herbaceous Ornamental Plants. "However, this condition is probably offset by the gracefulness seen in May and June."

Impatiens, the bright colored annual for shade, is a plant you'll notice everywhere. It's the default selection for practically every shaded apartment-building flowerbed. But the plant originated far from our urban habitat, in the mountains of East Africa. Eleven kinds of impatiens grow on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro.

7. My Hidden Motives

Finally, a word about my hidden motives. The estimable Jane Alexander, the actress who chaired the National Endowment for the Arts during the Clinton administration, used to say that we don't support music in schools so that some student will grow up to be a first violinist in the Boston Symphony. We teach music for the pleasure of it and so students can appreciate the essence and effort of the artistry. The same holds for gardening. I hope you'll find yourself noticing and appreciating other people's yards. You'll know something, from firsthand experience, about the effort involved.

Tell me how it's going—queries and observations gratefully received.

Extra credit: Buy one sweet-potato vine and plant it in a pot. Give it a pedestal, like a tree stump or an overturned pot in partial shade. You will learn the meaning of fast-growing.