As a gardener, I find that giving up on something that is just not working is one of the hardest things to do. A coveted or long-cherished plant finds its way into your garden, or sometimes a fledging seedling has dropped in and made itself at home, and after it spends one term in the garden, you need to determine whether it is a fit for you. But, plants do not have term limits. We do not decide their fate every fourth November. Perhaps we should.
The questions that we ask to determine a plant’s tenure in our garden are not dissimilar from those we should also ask about a candidate seeking reelection. Is it performing well? Are we better off with this plant in our garden than we were four years ago when it first arrived? Does it work well within the mix of our garden and play well with others? Is it aggressive and overly dominant? Does it harbor the pathogens of disease? Does having it in the garden make us feel better, or do we wake up most mornings wondering what havoc it might have wreaked overnight and feeling nervous about looking out the kitchen window as we make our morning coffee?
In many ways I am being silly and playful in a tense moment in our history. But learning to assess the individual players in our gardens is essential and often goes undone. For many years, my old garden contained a variegated daphne that underperformed. I had loved daphnes in other gardens. I loved their fragrance each spring as they broke into bloom, and their leaves that sat in concentric circles along each branch, and at some point I elected to add one to my front border. Daphnes are notorious for being particular about their living conditions, and the cultivar that I chose — ‘Carol Mackie’ — was no exception; they love sharp drainage, a little protection from winter winds and full sun. My site basically met those needs, or so I thought, but this plant never thrived there. It sulked and fussed, it demanded attention, and even when I gave it such care, it did not reward me with the flowers and foliage I had come to expect from it when I had seen it in other gardens.
I spent years cajoling it to perform better, improving its soil, managing its watering and, despite its poor performance, I kept it in the garden well beyond the moment in which it should have been removed from office, I mean, from the garden. Each spring it showed signs that this year might be better, and I gave it a chance, but it continued to underperform. Finally, one February, I looked at it, half dead, and simply plucked it out of the garden, opening up a space for something new to be planted come spring. I never looked back and now I try and assess all of the plants in my garden regularly and with the same performance standards in mind.
Perhaps that daphne would have been better suited to a border at a local golf course, or down in Palm Beach where it would have gotten more heat and sun, but it was not a candidate that I wanted to vote back into my garden, either now or in four years. Its replacement, Zenobia pulverenta ‘Woodlander’s Blue’, a Southern native, although reputed to be even more fussy and something of an underperforming prima donna, actually outperformed my expectations and prospered. Its silvered foliage served as a beautiful foil to the plants that surrounded it in the garden, and its flowers were modest and sweet when they showed up each season. It was “playing well with others,” as they say. My dear friend Jenks Farmer, who lives near its native habitat in South Carolina, claims he has never seen a happier specimen.
This experience taught me that sometimes you just have to rip something out, move on, and hope for the best. ‘The right plant for the right place’ is a slogan that stands the test of time.
Life goes on.
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A gardener grows through observation, experimentation, and learning from the failures, triumphs, and hard work of oneself and others. In this sense, all gardeners are self-taught, while at the same time intrinsically connected to a tradition and a community that finds satisfaction through working the soil and sharing their experiences with one another. This column explores those relationships and how we learn about the world around us from plants and our fellow gardeners.
