If you know someone who’d like Garden Study, please forward this their way — but make sure to guide them to the specific way to *opt-in* to Garden Study emails, which you can find here.
First, the Seed/Tuber Exchange Update: If you go to the doc, you’ll see that I’ve highlighted names of people who’ve expressed interest in an offer. The vast majority of you offered an abundance and there’s more than enough to go around, so go in there, find the email address of the person who offered the thing you’d love to grow, send them an email, make a connection and figure out details. (And if you missed signing up, you can send them an email anyway — they can always tell you they’re done exchanging for the season, no big deal). This is all casual and fun and haphazard, and we’re a small enough community that we can keep it that way.
In the next week, I’m going to start sending out requests to fill out the garden study questionnaire to people who’ve signed up — I’ve been distracted by my own gardening tasks, which I know is something all of you can understand. So in the meantime, I want to talk about something I’m very bad at: Spring Patience.
A few weeks ago, I asked one of my favorite employees at one of my favorite nurseries: If my gaura hasn't come back yet, is it time to give up? She shook her head and said that this was one of the slowest Springs in her gardening memory — and I should give it at least another two weeks. Well, the gaura still isn’t it up, and me checking it hasn’t helped. But I’ll probably wait another two weeks, even though there’s a very strong part of me that wants to get all the perennials in the garden and cooking.
As I said in my last Garden Study dispatch, here in the far corner of NW Washington, we had an incredibly temperate winter — with one blasted week of temps that dropped to the single digits. We’re not a place equipped to deal with those sorts of temps, and the roads became utterly undrivable, the windows thick with salty ice — and so many perennials took a beating. Wherever you live, you likely have a similar story of extreme weather, and the gardeners I know are all talking about the new normal: it’s not just the changing zones, it’s planting with the expectation that there will be some event that will challenge that zone designation altogether.
My hydrangeas are fine — although the ones I planted last year are only growing from the very base. The well-established rhodies are also fine, but the newer ones look like shit. Same for my viburnum, which probably just needs a hard prune and a go-over. My once-robust four-year-old daphne odora is hanging on by a thread, but growing new leaves. Even my euphorbia are struggling! And as for the gaura, well, they’re the sort of plants the city puts in a parking strip. They should be coming back! They are absolutely not! At least not yet!
Six weeks ago, I thought at least half of the perennials I planted in my shade garden last year were goners. Turns out, it was only the hardy fuschias. Agastache: back. Brunera: back. Jacob’s Ladder: back. Foam Flower: weary but back. Foxglove: back. Avocado hostas: also back because I don’t think you can actually kill a hosta in this climate. Also back: the UMBRELLA PLANT (also known as Darmera, formerly known as Indian Rhubarb) that never really took off after planting last year and I thought was a total goner.
What a CHAMP!!! I am marveling at it every day, the same way I’m marveling at the first shoots of the chameleon plants pushing up very slowly from the mulch. I’ll wait another week for the gaura. And then maybe another.
Gardening, for me, is about learning what I cannot control — no matter how much I research, or fertilize, or mulch. Sometimes you just have to wait and see.
What are you waiting on? What have you (nearly) given up on? Whose first signs of life have made you do a very quiet happy dance that no one else would understand???