A Gardener's Legacy

This marshy area leads down to a creek that feeds our pond. But the foundation of an old barn is on the other side of the creek. And another gardeners' garden must have grown near here once upon a time. The area is full of a white-flowered yarrow, an "escape" from some garden long gone.

EVERY GARDENER KNOWS HOW EASILY OUR WORK CAN FADE AWAY. Even as we're making it, the garden is already trying to unmake itself. Turn it over to someone else, and the garden certainly will be changed, this being a gardener's prerogative. The last point was brought home to me most recently (although hardly for the first time) while reading a New York Times article about the fate of the old walled garden at Hadspen House in Somerset, which was designed by famous British garden writer Penelope Hobhouse. Her own son, Niall Hobhouse, has bulldozed his mother's garden and is now holding a sort of contest for ideas on how to redo it!

But then again, sometimes gardens refuse to fade away. How many of us, I wonder, first became interested in gardens and gardening after reading or seeing some version of Frances Hodgson Burnett's The Secret Garden? The author, who had become a Christian Scientist after the death of her son, used a neglected but still living garden as a metaphor for the indomitable human spirit.

I recently remarried my ex-husband, and my own garden let me down. I wanted to decorate with flowers from the garden. But everything I'd planted was either just done blooming or hadn't quite started blooming yet.

And then some other gardeners' flowers came to my rescue, flowers that were a planted by a gardener whose name I may never know. (Although, this being a small community, there's a good chance one of my neighbors will be able to help me figure this out.) The area shown in the picture above lies between my house and an area that used to hold an old barn. The barn's foundation is still there, and I've often thought that this would be a great location for my own "Secret Garden."

I can't have been the first person to want to garden in this area, because it's full of the white-flowered yarrow Achillea ptarmica "The Pearl." It's one of several old-fashioned garden plants (including old roses, lilacs, and white narcissus) that are frequently found around old homesteads here. (FYI, "The Pearl," a garden center staple to this day, refers to any A. ptarmica with double flowers. Or so says the Missouri Botanical Garden.)

Thanks to the gardener who once planted this yarrow, no doubt looking forward to bouquets herself (and somehow I just know that this gardener was a woman), I was able to collect an armload of white flowers for my wedding decorations. With the addition of some ox-eye daisies (regarded as a weed in many parts of North America) and a few yellow cosmos that had volunteered in the garden, I had enough white and yellow blooms to fill a couple of vases. When a dear neighbor dropped by with flowers from her own garden, I ended up with three.

Thanks to these gardeners, one a friend in the present and one a friend from the past, I have been able to begin my married life surrounded by flowers. Thanks to the friend long gone, one of these flowers symbolizes the power of certain things, such as love perhaps, to persist.

Gifts from the fields: "The Pearl" yarrow, yellow cosmos, and daisies.

Garden Diary, Groundcovers for Free

THE SNOW HAS BARELY MELTED and there's always the possibility of more cold, but the crocuses were out and so was I. And what was I doing? Destroying what's left of the lawn and trying to get the weeds to grow, that's what. But maybe I should explain.

Two native plants that volunteer in lawns in many parts of North America, both treated as weeds by many homeowners, in fact make excellent groundcovers. Both will take quite a bit of foot traffic; both are naturally fairly tall (2-3 feet) but can be mowed to whatever height you desire. Both will grow almost anywhere as long as they get sun and spread readily, outcompeting most weeds. What's more, they're usually available for free.

One is common yarrow, Achillea millefolium. The feathery foliage is reason enough to plant it, but yarrow is also aromatic. The flowers, which attract butterflies, are flat-topped and whitish, though they may have a pinkish or purplish tinge to them. Yarrow will often bloom even if mowed several times during a season. Though the yarrow in my lawn had only just started to grow, I recognized it by the tiny green fronds, which almost look like ferns, attached to stout rhizomes.

The other is aster, Aster spp. There are so many wild asters that I can't be sure which one this is. Chances are, however, that it's Aster novae-angliae, New England aster. Almost all the asters work equally well as replacements for lawn. Like yarrow, they will often bloom even when mowed, and the white-to-purple flowers attract butterflies. This plant hasn't even started to show foliage yet, but I was able to recognize it by the thick rhizomes that have a purplish tinge to them.

So there I was, on a chilly day in early April, carefully patting the roots of "weeds" back into the soil after discarding all the lawn grasses I could find. I kept at it until the sun started to go down and the wind picked up. When you can no longer feel your fingers, it's time to go inside.

What do I have against lawn grasses? That's a topic for another day.

A Few of My Favorite Butterfly Plants

Easy-To-Grow Butterfly Plants

CLICK ON THE PHOTO above to see some of my favorite plants for the butterfly garden. (If you have tabbed browsing, please hold down the CTRL key when you click on the photo so that the web album opens in a new tab. I don't want to lose you!)