Fran's garden stories: June 2015

Last summer, I was hoping to do a few feature blogs on beautiful, inspiring gardens as I have occasionally done in the past. Instead, I started a new job in the late spring, then was hired as a CEGEP teacher and had to do a very fast preparation for courses, and my time was eaten up by other responsibilities, so extracurricular activities like visiting, photographing and covering guest gardens was put on the backburner. Now, as of today, I have finished the last of my correcting for the semester (UQAM went very late because of the strike this spring), and I am finishing a summer class this week, then I am officially on a longer vacation than I have ever had in my adult life, while I am frantically applying for teaching posts in the hope I can do this again next year. Wish me luck!

In the meantime, this past Sunday, our family went to our friend Olivier's for dinner. Ollie is an artist and a master gardener, and is source of both plants for my garden and lots of valuable information and advice. He is responsible for some of the best landscaping ideas that influenced the design and redesign of my garden. He has a great eye for what works well, and how to enhance the uniqueness of a garden.

What is particularly interesting about Ollie's garden is that Ollie lives in an apartment three stories up, and spends more time looking at the garden from above than from ground level, yet he is conscious of how it looks from the ground as well. He keeps his herbs and vegetables on his balcony overlooking the backyard, which is shared with the other residents of his building. He also has started a pot of lilac canes (from my garden) which he plans to pleach. I am introducing a bit of new vocabulary this blog. Ollie, among other things, knows a lot about trees, and he has been helping with our attempts at arborsculpting (shaping trees). This is not topiary, which is about trimming branches and leaves into shapes, but about shaping the branches and weaving and grafting branches together on the same tree, or across different trees. I learned another new word, espaliering trees, which is what Ollie and Josh did to our apple tree. After reading my last blog, Josh gave me a full explanation of espaliering trees, which was a technique used starting in Roman times, and raised to an artform in medieval Europe, in which orchards were condensed within the safe walls of keeps and castles by manipulating the branches so that the trees grow with a flat profile, or against walls. This gave the advantage of allowing for lots of fruit trees in a small space, and fitting your orchard into a walled enclosure safe from your enemies and accessible during a siege is a pretty good idea.

It also allows for some interesting decorative techniques, like making living, growing fences, as well as getting more fruit on a condensed tree. Ollie has a few examples in his yard.

One interesting thing he has done is take a long vine of Virginia Creeper which he ripped down, and wound it into a ball. The leaves died and fell off, and the remainder looks like a woody ball of wool. Ollie used one to prop up a lavender plant that was sprawling, to make it more visible at the back of the section of garden behind the taller lupines (below, left). There is another ball sitting in a corner in the shade, waiting to be relocated to some interesting position at a later date. Ollie told me that in the winter, he uses these woody balls to make a snowman, and he even made a wicker top hat out of branches to go on its head on a cocky little angle. I will definitely have to go over in the winter and get a picture of that.

It is difficult to see the details from the photograph, but he has done some decorative organizing of branches beneath his clematis. He also takes advantage of whatever architectural features he can in his garden design, such as his back stairs, walls and fences. Given that his back yard is more sheltered and sunnier than my front yard is, he has some flowers blooming ahead of mine, such as his roses which are in full bloom, while mine are just starting to bud. His evening primroses bloomed a few days before mine seen behind the pink roses.

Oh, and dinner was very nice too!

I mentioned in a previous post that our little creeping bellflower problem has become somewhat critical, with these pretty yet noxious invasive plants taking over the world if you let them. I did some research online to see what other people do about them. It turns out they are a variety of campanula imported from Europe that are unbelievably invasive and almost impossible to get rid of. I found a wonderful link on another blog which describes them so colourfully that I am posting the link rather than trying to outdo it. http://salisburygreenhouse.com/creeping-bellflower/

Above is one of the more interesting roots for this plant which I dug up this week, close to two feet deep and with no visible connection to the profusion of green jungle on the surface of the garden. I put a photo of it in my hand to get a sense of the proportions. Most of the roots look like thin carrots or parsnips, and Josh, who has joined me in many hours of excavations in the past few weeks, has taken to calling them carrotniks. I have been filling up bags and bags of the roots and plants. According to what I read online, this monster of a plant can regenerate from a fragment of a root, or a fallen leaf. It is resistant to all known pesticides, organic or highly toxic. Even Monsanto's infamous Roundup, which will never come anywhere near my garden, apparently will merely weaken the plant but not kill it. To the right you can see what a patch looks like before I get digging to clear it out. To compare, below you can see what it looks like after, keeping in mind that I had to uproot every one of my plants and extricate the creeping bellflowers from their roots, clear out several cubic meters of earth, filter out every root, then replant my now shocked and shrivelled flowers and vegetables. Even still, I am quite certain I have pulled out a lot of roots that had a small tip stuck jammed into the deep roots of a tree, some pieces that fell out of the bags or the odd leaf that we missed. The root above is missing its extremities which I know are somewhere down there under the earth regrouping into yet another attack on my garden. I know that at best we can keep it down but not eradicate it despite my effort, resulting in very sore arms and shoulders and a touch of developing carpal tunnel syndrome. I have slowed down my zealous work to a few hours per week with a day or two between efforts in order to prevent lasting damage to myself instead of the zombie weeds.

I had started by bagging every uprooted bit together with the dandelions, and had some concerns on what to do with it all. Since starting to compost 8 years ago, I do not throw any organic matter into the garbage, but was worried about both the quantity of weed matter as well as the vibrancy of both dandelions and creeping bellflowers, and that putting them all together in a compost bin, who knows what monstrous results would emerge. Prior to doing further research on the internet, Josh and I decided to start dumping subsequent loads of bellflower roots into an open weed composting area I have used informally over the fence from my backyard in the lilacs (technically our property, but very much out of sight). After reading the internet articles, I spent an hour late yesterday evening tying up all the bags of dandelion/bellflower detritus, and had a huge pile of bags going out in my garbage this morning. I will need to take some time to bag the whole pile of weeds and roots I dumped for the next garbage day, before it conspires to conquer the world. Oh, joy.

A rather pleasant result of our weeding frenzy is that we have put in place some long-term prevention methods to keep some difficult to mow areas of the yard free of weeds and grass. Josh picked up some nice stones, and put down geotextile underneath, and created some nice areas in the high traffic zones. I am delighted with the result, and it makes the yard look much neater and organized. As I am spending a lot of time in the front yard with the weeding, I seem to be having a lot of opportunities to socialize with neighbours, as well as a variety of friends or strangers walking down my street. Lots of encouragement for my efforts, which has been a nice support as I slave away digging.

In the meantime, Josh has been doing some work on the trees and bushes. As I write, we are awaiting the arrival of a tree cutter who will be cutting the upper levels of the lilac bushes framing the back part of the yard. Josh is pleased because the upper branches have grown right into the electrical wires, and although Hydro Quebec do not see this as a priority and did not respond when asked to help, Josh is not happy with the situation nor comfortable taking it on himself. Iulia will be very pleased because the lilacs are shading her vegetable garden.

Josh trimmed the branches immediately on top of the apple tree to give it more sun, now that it is finally producing apples. He also spent a day with Ollie working on sculpting the apple tree so that it would be flattened. He used rope and poles to shape the tree so that the branches are mostly on the same access, parallel to the laundry line and the garden rather than throwing its branches directly into my clothes. This allows the tree to coexist with my garden only casting a thin shadow as the sun passes overhead, and avoid damage by its proximity to my very active laundry processing. The result is that the tree appears a bit flattened when viewed from the side, but from the front or back it has a classical tree shape. Something like the flat Stanley of trees. I am not sure where Josh found this idea, but it does not require a lot of effort, just a periodic trimming and positioning of branches. It functions much like braces for teeth, and eventually, the tree takes on the new position and we can remove the poles and ropes holding it in place.

He also trimmed the crab apple arched trees which he is slowly sculpting using grafting and ropes to position branches. It is looking pretty nice.

Meanwhile, in the veggie garden, the cucumbers failed to sprout again. I am getting new seeds next year. In the meantime, being a bit late to start new seeds, I asked Josh to pick up some seedling when he was getting the stones, around 10. He neglected to notice that each pot held 4 or 5 plants, so brought home close to 50. I added another pot to the laundry platform, planted as many as I could fit, and offered the rest to Allan for the Shire garden, along with raspberry canes. I did not want to put any of them directly in the garden because of the problems I had with cucumber beetles two years ago, and last year my hanging pots dried up too quickly to keep the cukes alive. So trying a new approach, large pots on a raised platform. On the ground below the platform, are beans and peas, so I am interested to see how they will co-exist with cucumbers on the same chicken wire.

The poppies have bloomed. Apparently, there are three colours, orange, reddish orange and pink. The photos do not do them justice.

They are spectacular, huge, delicate and unreal. I only wish they lasted longer!

Their blooming is staggered, but I managed to catch a photo on the day when one was just finishing and three others popped open. There are more to come, but I think they are smaller flowers based on the buds.