July Calendar

I am mortified.  Here we are, well into July, and I’ve not posted the month’s instructions.  The fourth of July family reunion in the Catskill’s drove all else out of mind.  My apologies, but it’s not too late to catch up. 

The bloom trajectory continued in its aberrant pattern following last year’s devastating winter.  Yuccas, which  I have never seen bloom here have sent up huge spikes, and wispy pale pink wild roses are blooming cerise this year. 

The occasional yucca

Gardening Alone

I’ve noticed in extended conversations with gardeners that the first person singular “I” eventually shifts to the first person plural “we.”  The idea of the solitary gardener donning his or her gloves and hat of a morning and toiling away until dark is too romantic to survive reality.  When pressed, everyone has a spouse, partner, unwilling child or paid helper to assist.  One day you realize that no matter how many hours you stay on your knees, no matter how fine your tools or modest your ambitions, the garden has gotten away from you.

But where to find a helper?  In the suburbs, efficient maintenance companies seem to have limitless access to seasonal workers. Suburban lawns are mown, leaves are raked and blown, and garden beds are weeded.  In the country, the same work used to be done by high school boys.  As a breed, they have disappeared into air-conditioned spaces.  They might start out in your garden in May, but with the first hot spell they will have found a job in the Mall.     

I am fortunate in that a helper appeared just as I was about to throw in the trowel.  In July of 2006 a note was dropped in my Catskills mailbox by a woman wanting to rent a house; she was starting a business looking after houses and gardens.  While I couldn’t offer Natalka Chas a roof over her head, I could give her one day a week in my garden.  It has changed my life (and advanced beyond one day a week).

Her first job was to tackle the lycoris beds.  I had worked vigorously to clear the beds of all but a few lycoris, but they returned to mock me.  The thistle is their ally and once established the combination is almost impossible get out.  Although I vowed to eradicate them early, the lycoris were beloved by the Laissez-faire Gardener, and so they remained.  But we have managed to narrow then down from a cast of thousands to a mere representative sample.  

Emerging lycoris, before Natalka

Their habits are unfortunate.  They are the first plants to emerge here,  pushing their noses out of the ground when there is not a speck of green showing elsewhere.  They then send out mounds of strappy foliage, obscuring the opportunity to plant anything else. As soon as it is too late to plant around them, the foliage disappears completely and the thistles have taken over.  In late summer, when you have completely forgotten about them, leafless stalks appear, with stunning blooms at the crown.

July border, after Natalka

Within two days, Natalka cleared the beds of weeds, scuffled the overgrowth out of the gravel paths surrounding the beds, built up the edges of the beds with flat stones collected from the endless supply scattered in the woods, and appeared with a station wagon filled with monarda, buddleia, Russian sage, nepeta, and black- and brown-eyed Susans.  They were to keep company with the few Shasta daisies and phlox I had managed to shoehorn in, and the old peonies which were strong enough to withstand any insult.

The work of a garden helper is immediately measurable, but the subtle influence is incalculable.  One would think it would free you to sip iced tea and read all day, but it reality it galvanizes you to contemplate new work.  In the five years since Natalka arrived, we have been deep in restoration: The old peony walk has been greatly expanded and improved. The berry bramble and the cutting garden have been brought under control ever since we installed raised beds.  A rock hollow that used to be surrounded by lilies of the valley is planted with the same once again.  The adjoining patch of tiger lilies, seen in an old photograph, has been re-established.  The perennial border and the old cutting garden behind it are flourishing.

August border, after Natalka

The old rhododendron bed opposite the porch has been refreshed with a number of varieties, underplanted with tiarella and fern. The sunny, dry half of that border is filled with rugosa rose and lavender. The old stone edge buried under decades of frost heave and leaf mold has been uncovered.

Other gardens followed, each one bringing the neglected landscape back to life. None of this would have happened if Natalka had not dropped a note into our mailbox.  This wild corner of our universe is finally coming under limited control.  In the meantime, we water, check in daily on the well water production, fill in the bare spots, divide and give away, and wait for the arrival of butterflies, lightning bugs and the night sounds of katy-dids.

The Gardener in Exile

Gardeners have periodically been exiled from their gardens, beginning with Adam and Eve and continuing to this day.  Eve was perhaps more prescient than Adam and, when offering the apple, might have suspected there was something beyond their idyllic existence.  The sons born after the expulsion carried the full range of emotional complexities, which their descendants now carry into the present generation, depending upon your religious persuasion.

Since the original expulsion from Eden, gardeners have struggled mightily to impose a semblance of order over nature’s chaos to create a place of repose. We see this repeated through the centuries in both great gardens and small.  For the gardener in our time, exile can be a cataclysmic move, or nothing more than the painful notion of missing a weekend. 

The Peony Walk

The only border behaving itself this time of the year is the Peony Walk.  This is its fifth year, and we are beginning to divide.  The Walk started as a narrow gravel path flanked by three holes with a single peony dropped into each.  Naming it the Peony Walk was a nomenclature typical of the Laissez-faire Gardener, the owner of the property, who encouraged me to garden there.  (Note: the Laissez-faire Gardener was so named followed a question about the right time to prune. “The right time,” he said authoritatively, “is whenever the mood strikes me.”)



Work Schedule for June in the Garden

This time of year everything in our Catskills garden needs doing.  If you’ve sown seed outdoors, they need to be sprinkled every day to germinate.  Bought or home-grown seedlings must be set out.  A rigorous weeding followed by a proper mulching should eliminate most weeding in the coming months.  If you’ve missed eliminating the thistles it’s too late.  If you haven’t gotten the grasses out of the bed, they will soon seed and it’s all over.  The perennial border is filling up and we have grubbed out as many of the relentlessly spreading monarda as possible.

Below is the week-by-week calendar for June: