When Faking It Isn't a Bad Thing

When Faking It Isn’t a Bad Thing

All of us have attended weddings and marveled at beautiful bouquets a bride and her attendants carried down the aisle. Those of us who enjoy flowers appreciate well-designed arrangements that brighten the sanctuary. Then our roaming eyes note the corsages and boutonnieres that mothers, fathers, grandparents, and groomsmen wear. In the past, brides were at the mercy of their mother’s garden or a savvy florist for these bridal necessities. Every blossom was freshly cut and arranged  just before the wedding. Nowadays, wives-to-be visit hobby stores to select realistic silk flowers that hold color and shape before and after their nuptials.

Like all new trends, this one got off to a slow start and guaranteed a bit of snooty commentary among guests with old-fashioned sensibilities. However, manufacturers realized the potential for these everlasting blossoms and tweaked their product until it’s impossible to tell whether you’re looking at someone’s garden glory or a fake. Who hasn’t slyly fondled a silk plant or arrangement to see if it’s the real deal? It doesn’t take much imagination to see why this market succeeded while others didn’t.

I’ve discovered that weddings aren’t the only place silk flowers are lovely to look at and affordable. Folks who live in deer country are discovering they can design colorful flowerbeds that brighten their yards and last all summer for the same price they’d pay for garden shop plants.

For readers who’ve never dealt with a determined doe or buck with an acquired a taste for tulips, daffodils, geraniums, and daisies, the gardener fights a losing battle. Those wily critters can leap high fences, gobble tender leaves and blooms, and exit before you can ask “Whitetail or muley?”

This summer, I’ve watched several does mow neighbors’ and my healthy plants to stubble, so I’m familiar with their sneaky strategies. Nothing frustrates a green-thumbed dreamer more than going to bed knowing their prized plant is about to flower and coming outside the next morning to find sheared  stumps it its place.

A nearby resident figured out how to deceive the local herd and still enjoy a colorful yard. As I walked past their waist-high fence week after week, I noted delicate iris, hyacinths, tulips, daisies, and daffodils. After seeing these always perfect flowers, I wondered why their blooms lasted so long. Curiosity overcame me until I wandered close enough to examine their garden more closely. Yep, they’d torn a page out of a bridal magazine and loaded their bordered beds with silk plants. Apparently, they didn’t buy cheap stuff because this greenery looks real.

I’d loved to have seen the face of the deer that bounded over that fence to sample that first fibrous petal. If I didn’t relish the act of potting tiny sprouts  and nurturing them as they grow into lush, leafy foliage filled with swelling buds, I’d be the silk plant aisle’s best customer. Those deer would need a mineral oil dosing to clean their systems out after they’d invaded my fake jungle.

                                                                                                                                               

A Good Thing Turned Monster

Wallace Stegner suggests specific landscapes speak to a person’s heart, and he’s right. Many have a favorite place that roots the spirit. Plants have a similar effect, and that preference is genetic at my house. Mom and I love clematis blossoms. We can’t grow too many or take enough photos of those blooming in our flowerbeds.

We’ve found we can cultivate them in western Kansas if we nurture them tenderly. That says volumes because this plant succumbs easily to heat and drought, natural elements of Kansas summers. Ironically, a wild species thrives in Wyoming’s cool mountain air and takes on kudzu-like characteristics, wrapping prolific tendrils around fences, trees, and anything else that holds still a moment too long.

Four Easters ago, I gave my mom two plants, one purple and one white. She tucked them in soil east of her front door and watched them twine up metal porch poles. That first summer, blossoms were sparse and plants stunted. The next season, they decided to showoff and bloomed prolifically as they advanced toward her guttering. Despite the resulting fuzzy seeds, sometimes called old man’s beard, her plants didn’t spread. In fact, the opposite occurred.

The third year, only the white vine re-sprouted. Her purple variety didn’t survive. Despite our disappointment at losing the deeper-hued plant, its companion compensated. At one point, Mom had 50 saucer-sized, white blooms climbing toward heaven. To support the extra weight, she added a chicken wire frame.

After watching her success, I planted clematis near my back porch. This year it flowered for the first time so I can expect hordes of blossoms next spring. Like mom’s plant, the seeds haven’t spread. Until I visited Wyoming during the summer, I thought this was unfortunate. After seeing what happens with unchecked clematis growth, I’m delighted our plants haven’t reproduced.

In central Wyoming’s Wind River Range, wild clematis fills river bottoms and takes over yards of anyone naïve enough to try to domesticate it. When I view the acres of green vines climbing logs, trees, bushes, fences, and bridge foundations, I see how it got its folk name--virgin’s bower. I might not understand the virgin part, but left to its own devices, this plant forms shady tunnels big enough provide napping space for several classrooms full of students. Less lethargic children could play hide-n-seek for days in these green grottoes and not find all their playmates.

In one familiar yard, previous owners turned this wild vine with delicate yellow blossoms loose along their fence. Once they realized its capacity to overtake everything in its path, they wrenched woody stems loose from metal fencing and considered that a closed episode. Imagine their surprise to discover  hairy seedpods had blown about their lawn and took root the next spring. Instead of an orderly row of trailing creepers clinging tightly to chain link, baby vines sprouted and spread across two lots.

Once I saw this favorite plant growing unchecked, I was glad the cultured clematis growing in mom’s flowerbed and mine hadn’t reproduced. Despite having lovely flowers that succor bees, this plant growing out of control is a monster that becomes too much of a good thing.

Old-Fashioned Gramma’s Garden

Lots of us dream about accomplishing something that makes others shake their heads in wonder. My funky lifetime wish has been to grow an old-fashioned gramma’s flower garden full of purple, blue, and pink larkspur and bachelor buttons; orange, red, and yellow Indian blankets; lavender cosmos; yellow and white daisies; and multi-color hollyhocks. Despite lifetime efforts and lots of money spent on seeds, it’s taken me 40 years and aspringtime of gentle, well-timed, ample rains to make my dream come true.

The irony of this beautiful flowerbed makes me chuckle. I left town and abandoned it to Mother Nature’s care for weeks. During that time, it had no encouragement. No weeding, no fertilizing, no thinning out plants, no early morning sitting on the paving stones dreaming about the pretty bouquets I hoped to harvest and  display in my kitchen window. Apparently, dirt and seeds enjoy benign neglect because I drove up after that absence to spy thriving pinks, purples, blues, lavenders, whites, yellows, oranges, and reds spilling over garden borders and waving wildly  in evening breezes. They were everything I’d hoped for all the years I’d planted store-bought seed and carefully tended previous endeavors.

So, the next irony in this story is that girlfriends gave me hollyhock and larkspur seeds a few years ago. I then harvested bachelor button and Indian blanket seeds that I’d planted two summers ago and sprinkled those among my friends’ gifts. None of this year’s crop came from miserly garden shop packets. Nope, these were homegrown. Two fellow gardeners and I collected dried pods from previous years’ growth, separated the tiny seeds, and then saved them in paper bags to share.

The hollyhocks, bachelor buttons, Indian blanket, and larkspur took a year to gain a solid foothold in my yard. Last summer, I had scraggly, hesitant blooms--nothing like the towers of frothy color dancing boldly under this spring’s sun. In addition to the rain helping, I suspect good old Kansas breezes had something to do with the expansion of my plantings. A few seeds blew south and started new growth. Then stout southerly winds tumbled the majority of them north across our driveway until they landed in a bed of wood chips. Imagine my surprise to see them take root and grow.

By allowing nature to take its course, I ended up with stunning flowers in places I didn’t sow them. Initially, I thought I’d pull the unplanned starts, but I’m glad I didn’t. Not only do I have a new bed of larkspur and bachelor buttons outdoing itself on the other side of the drive, I have hollyhocks in places I never expected to find them. They proudly belong.

Perhaps letting Mother Nature do her thing in the sowing and watering is the secret to a successful old-fashioned, Gramma’s garden. That saucy anthropomorph has done a stellar job  taking seeds friends gave me, multiplying and then tossing them in the wind, and raining on them to show me how to get the job done. I’m going to help her out by harvesting, drying, and passing on these tiny power packs of beauty to my daughters and my friends.

Masochistic Flowers

Take a close look at a rose bush, clematis vine, or slender columbine stalk. You’ll see perfectly formed leaves that bugs can chew to look like fishnet stockings in a feeding or two and fragile blooms that appear as if they’d unravel at the seams during high winds. Anything this delicate looking ought to frighten new gardeners. Not so. My mom has tested these three species and discovered they like abuse. In fact, they thrive on it.

For the last five decades, Mom has grown lovely roses in yards in two states. Her plants are always healthy and bloom profusely through the summer. Last year, her plants continued to produce huge, scented blossoms into mid-November when a visit from Jack Frost nipped them and ended the display. In this case, she feeds the plants regularly. Then in late February or early March, she grabs her clippers and takes out any stored up winter aggressions on those thorny stems. When she’s done, stubs of the former plant remain. By May, it’s clear the roots enjoyed this shearing as they produce hordes of new shoots that soon sport lovely red, white, and pink flowers she can enjoy on the plant or cut to put in a vase to perfume her house.

Mom’s green thumb includes more than roses. This last summer, Mom’s showy clematis overtook much of her front flowerbed draping itself over surrounding plants. Unsure of how to handle this issue, last fall she grabbed her shears again and took after those dry stems, cutting the vine back like a pedicurist trimming too-long toenails. All winter long, she worried that she might have gotten carried away and killed her favorite spring harbinger. Imagine her delight when she saw new growth earlier this year. Triple that emotion to describe how she reacted when she came home from a short trip to find over fifty saucer-sized blooms climbing her trellis.

Not surprisingly, cutting back that aggressive clematis also benefitted the yellow columbine growing in the area in front of Mom’s treasured vine. Last year her Colorado flowers were two feet tall. This year, they’re at least six inches to a foot higher. And she didn’t fertilize them. This growth is the result of receiving more sun along with abundant spring rains. You’d think towering, long stemmed blooms would succumb to some of the “breezes” we’ve enjoyed lately. Not these guys. We had a doozy of storm the other night and by sunrise, those yellow flower stood at attention to welcome those bright rays.

I tend to garden cautiously, but after seeing the results my mom gets by energetically trimming her plants and then not worrying about what the weather does to them, I’m going to change my ways. I’ve concluded that plants are like feet and hands. Anyone watching a pedicure or manicure for the first time would swear the technician was abusing the client during the process of softening and pushing back cuticles and dealing with calluses. In reality, anyone who’s enjoyed such services knows the treatment feels great, and like my mom’s treatment of her garden, produces lovely results.