Gertrude's Flower Garden - Weekly Diary

6/25/99 - If you garden, you quickly learn how persistent and ingenious nature is in preserving the thousands of plant species. I have already mentioned my coleus and ageratum, which I must pull up like weeds to prevent them taking over the garden. (Interesting, isn't it: plants we don't want become "weeds" and those we do "flowers," but to nature they are all equal.) This week in working on my beds I have been pulling up hundreds of Black-eyed-Susans (rudbeckia), a flower in which I delight--their bright, happy faces swaying on long graceful stems add beauty to any garden.

Lillies-of-the-Valley were one of our wedding flowers, and in the springtime their pretty white bells and lovely fragrance bring wonderful memories to me--Gertrude loved them and planted them everywhere. Unfortunately, however, they refuse to be confined to the spot where you plant them. Nature has devised a wonderful underground spreading root system, that pops up new plants as it spreads. I must constantly rip out these invading roots to keep the Lilies-of-the-Valley in the areas where I want them--along walls, around trees, nestled in corners.

So a gardener must not only be a nurturer of plants, but also must decide which should survive and which should not, if the garden is to reach its full beauty. The art of gardening, like all art, involves selection, not only of kinds of flowers, but also of numbers. My tendency is to try to save rather than destroy, but I know that to have a lovely garden I must control nature's tendency to have more of everything.

I am still transplanting the "volunteers" as I progress around the garden edging, cultivating, and fertilizing. I have mostly finished with the coleus and balsam, but there are still lots of cleome and celosia--the impatiens are still to come. Flowers, also, are not particular about where they grow, so that I spend time moving tall-growing plants from the front of beds to the back.

Nicotiana, browallia, geraniums, cone-flowers, coreopsis, rudbeckia, star zinnias, impatiens, begonias, blue salvia, and astilbe are among the flowers blooming now. In a few weeks the garden will be at its showiest.

Last autumn, I planted 100 red tulips in groups of five in the front Triangular bed. This is how they looked this spring.

6/18/99 - Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary

7/2/99 - Gertrude's Flower Garden Weekly Diary ntgates@worldnet.att.net