A visit to a former employer in Bedford has me doing that dangerous thing to which gardeners can fall prey: comparing my gardening practices with those of others. It leaves me worried that I am not keeping up with my weeding. (Hint: my ex-boss just had a tag sale that was an Instagram sensation, and her garden is usually in perfect form.) While I am sure she could find something that needed doing in her garden, I would have killed to have my beds in such order.
I always try to get ahead of weeds early in the season, removing any small weed seedlings as I cut back perennials and trim dead and broken branches from shrubs. I always intend to get some mulch down quickly to stop any more weeds from germinating, but, somehow, I am more interested in planting in the spring than in garden maintenance and I find myself in the early days of the summer trying to get my beds into order.
A few simple actions can make the garden look more orderly than it really is. My friend Peter Wooster taught me years ago that if someone you hope to impress says they are stopping by, the action that will get you the most for the least is to mow the lawn and to edge your beds with a nice clean line. These two simple tasks provide you with a sense of order and purpose in the garden. Peter’s precision in cutting clean edges around each of his foursquare borders was in alignment with his work as an architect. He laid out a line with string and two pieces of rebar and cut the edge with great precision, deep and hard. The he mulched the “alleys” in front of his plants to show each perennial off to its best advantage. Peter, like the aforementioned Bedford gardener, managed to do this as early in the season as he could, and it paid off.
I am just getting to this task now, but even this late in the season it bears noticeable results. The straight edge (or, in the case of several of my beds, the sweeping and undulating arcs) somehow appear purposeful and make the beds appear orderly. And if there is time, I jump in and pull out whatever jewelweed and mustard garlic I can, trying to catch it before it flowers and sets seed. This is often all I can get done on any given week in the early summer, but as the years go by, I notice that the seed bank of weeds in older beds seems to be dissipating, giving me hope that I might someday be one of those people who manages to be ahead of the game in the garden.
But in the meantime, I have discovered another secret weapon in the war against weeds: annuals that are just as aggressive and carry the eye away from what lies beneath. This season, as I finally get to trenching my borders with a flat headed spade (a stainless steel one that was produced by my Bedford friend more than two decades ago and is still holding up), I look across a field of breadseed poppies which have proliferated in my garden over the past few years. Each year, I save their seed and, after my spring clean-up, I cast them about, thinking all the time of the Wicked Witch of the West and her poppy fields that stopped Dorothy and her friends on their way to Oz.
I may not be as on top of it as my other friends, but at least I have found a way to distract visitors from my shortcomings in the garden. Well, at least for another season at the very least. And now after all this hard work, like Dorothy, I will lie down and take a much-deserved rest, free of any dreams of my garden disappointing a last-minute guest. Although if anyone tells me that they may stop by, I still need to grab the mower and give the lawn a quick trim.
