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Episode 63: Rain gardens with Cathy Corlett, the Bearded Iris
Leslie: Welcome to Into the Garden with Leslie here on Newsradio WINA. This show is sponsored by Holistic Pest Solutions. I'm Leslie Harris and things are popping around here. I listened to a gardening podcast the other day, and the host listed all of the things that are blooming in her garden. I just don't know if that's a good week for me to start that because it's TMI, baby. TMI! I'm so lucky.
Our plant of the week is the Bearded Iris, and I'll be chatting with Cathy Corlett, who is a landscape architect from the West Coast. And lastly, we'll talk about what is going on in my garden and what could be going on in your garden this week.
A few weeks ago, I mentioned that I like showing my garden off, even when it may not be worthy. No matter what intervention I attempt, it's a pretty cool piece of land in the middle of suburbia with these amazing trees and this cool stream that runs through it. Anyway, if you're ever in town and you want to see it, you should let me know.
The plant of the week is the Bearded Iris and the botanical name is the Iris germanica. What could be easier? What everybody calls an Iris has a scholarly and complex botanical name of Iris. Iris means rainbow, and that is what you get when you see the range of colors in this perennial. We're talking about all of the colors, I guess, except for a true Cardinal red, and that's okay with me. You may grow Siberian Iris or the Japanese Iris or those cute little native Iris cristata, but the ones I'm featuring this week are the ones that have the beards, or maybe it looks to you like it's sticking its tongue out at you. That look, the tongue sticking look is even easier to discern with the bi-color cultivars. You hardly have any choice with these plants. I mean, a paltry 60,000 to choose from. Pathetic, really. And do you know that they are breeding tons of repeat blooming German Iris?
Last week I mentioned the reblooming Azalea and how I didn't feel the strong need to include those in my garden, but my need is indeed strong with the Bearded Iris. Some gardeners may feel that it's just a little bit incongruous to have a spring bloom in the heat of August and I get that. But with irises, if you see a sudden iris bloom when you sort of aren't thinking it's time for an iris bloom, they make this capricious appearance on a humid, horrible summer day. Well, I'm going to welcome that and I will probably cut it and I will bring it inside to the air conditioning with me.
You know what else I love about the bearded irises is the foliage. That tall gray-green vertical accent. That does it for me all season long. One of my first clients that I had years ago when I had my crew - actually it was before I had my crew. It was just me and my truck - and she had me over late in the season the first year I started my business. There was a mature and at that stage, very unkempt, big stand of Iris foliage and old flowers where she passed by every day. And it was so satisfying to cut all the old flower stocks and to peel off the brown or bent foliage. And what was left was a neat clump of vertical foliage, like foliage knives sticking up into the air. This lady thought I was a magical creature and she hired me and that's really all it takes to make these guys look good later in the season when the foliage starts to get tatty. You just remove what isn't looking good to you. That, or grow behind something else so you don't have to look at the squalor.
Irises want full-on sun to bloom well, and they have one other sunbathing requirement, and that is that they want their rhizomes, which are those fleshy, sweet potato-y bits from whence they grow, they need to have sun too. Well, I mean, not total, full-on sun, but they need to be very close to the surface, if not sitting on the surface of the soil. This perennial along with peonies do not prosper with a layer of mulch. If your landscapers mulch for you, chances are that he or she isn't aware of this fact. So you might want to go scooch it away from those two perennials. And while you're at it, from all woody plants too, especially your trees. It can be nearby, but it really shouldn't be touching the wood of trees.
So let's get back on track - sorry to digress. Do you know that irises can grow in Zones 3 through 10? That's like everybody, baby. I mean, you folks up in Yukon, Alaska, I guess I'm not talking to you, but then again, I'm probably not talking to you. Each Iris stock produces about half a dozen flowers, and because the old flowers a bit gnarly, you can just trim off the oldies if they're disrupting your view of a current bloom, but they kind of scrunch up and get really small, like the Wicked Witch when Dorothy poured water on her. So from a distance, it really probably isn't too bad. If you cut them and bring them inside, you can take away the old bits and just enjoy the current blooms. They bloom for a couple of weeks. And of course like any popular perennial, there are early ones, middle ones, late ones, short ones, taller ones, middle size ones.
My first ones are these eight inch tall minis that I have growing along my front path, like eight inches tall. They seem to always coincide with the Historic Garden Week, which led me to get asked which cultivar they were when my garden was on tour last year. Quite a handful of people said, excuse me. What is that early, short, peach-colored Iris that you have blooming out front? And my answer was, oh, that! That is an early, short, peach-colored Iris. In other words, I have lost track of the cultivar name because that is a particular strength of mine.
The care of irises. Again, they want full old sun. They want to be planted right on the surface of the soil. They don't need a ton of water once established and they can tolerate some drought. Deer will eat them, but they are not in the Ghirardelli brownie category for them. They won't go for them first like I would before dinner. You can remove tatty leaves and you should deadhead your repeat bloomers if you want to have repeat bloom. Of course, if you don't like to look at old Iris sticks, you should deadhead it anyway.
German irises can get this thing called Iris bore, and you can see the holes in the tubers if they're suffering from that. Because of my lack of interest in plant pathology, let me just advise you to look for a good source online if you get that malady. Sorry, I can't help. Mine have had it. If they died from that, I went shopping, but I really don't remember ever losing an Iris plant to those little guys. It was more like sharing the plant with those little guys, but I have lost irises to crown rot, and that is a product of too much shade, too much water, and the rhizomes not getting their tanning requirements in the sun, so then they got all squishy and sad and you will really know it if you have this problem. The foliage is barely attached to the goo that was formerly the rhizome and the smell is memorable, and really not in a good way. It's distinctive too. You know when you smell something and the memory takes you right back to some place? When I smell that smell, it takes me right back to the last time my irises had crown rot. It's a unique smell.
The clump will grow and expand, and if you see that telltale donut hole in the middle of the clump, then maybe you need to divide, but really you don't have to, unless you want more of them, or unless you notice that your plant isn't flowering as strongly as it used to. The rhizomes are right on the surface, as I said, but the roots run deeper so get your shovel way under there. And once you get it out of the ground, you can see how to work the bits apart to form new bits. It's an easy one to divide; just follow your nose.
Some people asked for sources. My friend Abby recommended a big company called Shriners out in Salem, Oregon. I looked at their website and they have so many things to choose from. High Country Gardens has a lot of them, and then I've ordered from Gilbert Wild. And once again, I mean you do you, but I would probably never again buy an Iris that isn't a repeat bloomer. Life's a little short. I mean, more flowers.
This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA on Newsradio WINA, kindly delivered by Dos Amigos Landscaping and Colorblends bulbs. Coming up, we're going to talk with Cathy Corlett about rain gardens and two other topics that I really hadn't thought about that much before.
Hey, this is Leslie Harris with Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, and today we are very lucky to be able to chat with a real live landscape architect. When I was running a gardening business, some people who didn't know much about gardening would say, oh, are you a ...? No! A landscape architect is the real deal. Her name is Cathy Corlett and she is out in Portland, Oregon. The reason that I wanted to get on the show is because she knows about one topic that I knew I wanted to concentrate on, which was rain gardens. And then as we got to know each other a little bit, there were two others that I really didn't know anything about. And as you know, if you're a regular listener we like to learn, and the two others that will get to our interpretive gardens and trauma informed gardens, which sounds traumatic or dramatic, but it's not. It's very cool. Cathy, thank you so much for being with us today.
Cathy: Thanks, Leslie. Thanks for having me.
Leslie: I'm so glad that you're here. You have your own business, but you've also taught. Tell us a little bit about where you are and what you do.
Cathy: I'm currently in Portland, Oregon, and I'm a landscape architect, as you said. I work for clients in the nonprofit realm, helping with communications and with outdoor spaces that are part of that.
Leslie: Okay. Very cool. So now how did you get started in all this? Have you always loved plants?
Cathy: I have always loved plants. One of my earliest memories was when I was younger than 5. My mom came running out into the garden and she was really glad to see me in this because I had gotten up really, really early as 3 year olds do and went out into the garden and I was taking the little hats off the California poppies to help them bloom, and I was just having fun in the garden. But it was probably five in the morning and she had checked my bed and I wasn't there.
Leslie: And so she had a few gray hairs and you had fun in the garden. So we know what you do for a living. Where did you do your studies? And tell us a little bit about the teaching that you've done.
Cathy: Undergraduate school, I went to Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut. Decided to go to graduate school on top of that because I found out about landscape architecture. Then I went to the University of Oregon and I did their five-year program - undergraduate and graduate. I focused on landscape history. I also interned at the Museum of Natural History when I was a student. We did an exhibit on trees and I did my Master's thesis about urban trees.
Leslie: The Museum of Natural History out there, or back east?
Cathy: At the University of Oregon. They have the Museum of Natural and Cultural History now they call it.
Leslie: Okay. Fun. And then you have done some teaching in addition to. Do you still teach in addition to running this landscape architecture firm?
Cathy: I'm not currently. I have taught off and on at the University of Oregon. I'll go in and do critiques when they need that for the students at the end of the term. My teaching now is just about building landscapes that teach.
Leslie: Let's start with the one that you know about that I don't know about much, but it hits you in the face. Every podcast that you listen to, every gardening magazine that you flip through, it's like, oh, that would be great for a rain garden. Oh, you should build a rain garden. Oh, let's have a rain garden. And I don't like my understanding of rain gardens. I find it very vague. Could you help me out?
Cathy: Yeah. It is kind of vague, cause it's raining here. It's going to rain until June here in Portland probably so every garden's a rain garden right now. They all love it. But officially a rain garden is a place that can help you take that rain that's coming down off your roof and put it into the landscape and put it into the aquifer and help it be again part of the ecology, rather than having it just go off into pipes really quickly. And when it goes off really quickly, I didn't appreciate this till I started working for various different non-profit clients how impactful it is when you do the multiplication. Everybody's taking the rain away from their house off into the pipes. That can decrease what the engineers call time of concentration. The time it takes the water to get out of the sky off your roof and into the river is very fast, a very short amount of time, if it's all operating according to how we've engineered it to work, but that can be bad because all of a sudden, now you have a flood.
Leslie: Yeah.
Cathy: That water doesn't go into the aquifer. It doesn't go down into the soil, down into the ground and it's really a great idea to just to add a feature to your yard to help prevent flooding and to recharge the aquifer.
Leslie: The knowledge on this must have changed over the last, I don't know, half century because I drive around Charlottesville, Virginia and I see some places where there's literally concrete in the form of a wedge that's clearly meant to take the rain from the road and to shoot it down someplace into a river. There's no chance of it getting through concrete into the ground. It's supposed to go away. I'm hopeful that nobody would build something like that now.
Cathy: Yeah. Great point. I think that in a lot of places, it is kind of still the standard way of doing business, because this kind of stuff is slow to catch up, but more and more cities are realizing the impact of it and that they're having to retrofit. Here in Portland, they had combined sewer and storm water overflowing so we had all your water that came off the streets and everything was all going down and being treated at the sewage plant, which is unnecessary and it's fairly clean. And so let's go and do this differently. A lot of cities are now changing that, but it had been the standard thing to just get it weighed off. So it depends on where you are, whether that's required or whether it's just a good thing to do.
Leslie: So what could a normal gardener do to think about keeping the water on their property? If they're a person listening to this podcast, they're a gardener and therefore they want that water. They want to save it. So how can somebody have a place in their yard where it's going to be? I actually have these horrible, ugly, really ugly water tanks and it goes down off of my roof into 300 gallon tanks, and then I have a sump pump and I spray out the murky old stuff when it's time to. I don't know if everybody wants to do that. What are some easy ways to save that water?
Cathy: Great question. and in places like Portland, we don't get water all summer so if you want to save the water. But here, if you want to have enough water to get through the summer, you're going to need really big tanks, like massive, because it might not rain from the end of May till the beginning of November. It's not feasible to save that much water most of the time. So what you can do is design for a very dry summer, and when it is wet in the winter and you want to use that water, you can design a rain garden.
There's three things you have to remember when you're going to design a rain garden. You don't know what you don't know. That's one of them. That's the umbrella thing. Be aware of what you might not know. Don't make assumptions. Number one, don't put it in the ground any closer than 10 feet to your house and think about where your utilities are, because if you put anything in the ground that's right next to one of your underground utilities, that could be bad. So think about that ahead of time. You don't want to be putting a tree right next to your water line and they get in your head. Those trees, they know how to get in my head and they are like no, over there. A little closer to the water line. Those are the sewer lines right there and you just put me over here. It's going to be great. I'm going to be great over here. Don't let them do that. And the third thing is, start with trees. Think about trees because ...
Leslie: Because they suck up the most?
Cathy: Yeah. You start designing a landscape and you start to think about all these wonderful little flowers and things. Great. Flag that. Hold that thought, but think about your tree canopy and where you can put a tree. Because if we're really thinking about stormwater, we're thinking about how the tree canopy is going to intercept that water as it comes down and slow it up a little bit. Evergreen trees are great. They're photosynthesizing all year round. They have leaves all year round in our Pacific Northwest climate. When it's just pouring down all winter, it's really valuable to have these evergreens around that can help slow down all that rain pouring off the ground.
Leslie: Isn't that funny? So when you said let's think about trees first, I just assumed that it was the big system under the ground, the roots that would help suck up the extra water, but you're talking about the actual umbrella effect, the canopy. That's different than I thought. What about those roots? Do you have to be careful of them also when you make the decision about where to put them?
Cathy: The roots are of course very important too. You want to stay at least five feet away from your water line, your sewer line, gas line, any underground utilities. And think about trees first that also helps you know, oh yeah. Have I got overhead electric, phone, anything else going on in the sky there? So I've been thinking about my tree that it's going to be the anchoring point of my storm garden. Don't start with thinking about little plants on the ground. Think about what you have room for in terms of tree or shrub canopy.
Leslie: That makes really good sense, I suppose. That probably makes really good sense for all garden design, but particularly this. This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA and we're talking with Cathy Corlettt, who's a landscape architect and we're sort of sussing the basics of a rain garden at this moment. How big do they have to be, say for a normal, I don't know, half acre sort of suburban situation?
Cathy: Great question, and that will depend on how much rain you are putting into it. Can't go too wrong. You can't really oversize it, but you can undersize it so you can think about your roof area. Think about where your downspouts are and how much roof areas coming through the downspouts that you are thinking you're going to take to your rain garden. Quick calculation. The city of Portland, the city of Eugene, Oregon have online calculators that can do just as a homeowner to try to figure out, okay, well, if I have this much area, I can basically take the average storm or the most impactful storm that you're designing for. And that'll tell you much water is coming off of your roof and then you have your calculation of how much water is coming off. But it's not great to do this in a really tight, urban situation where you really don't have any wiggle room, but you can eyeball it a little bit. You can kind of go well, based on my roof being that big and if I make a giant rain garden, that's as big as my roof or whatever, that ought to take up that much water.
But you also should think carefully about what your soils are before you size it. If you have alluvial soils like I've had on a recent project, water just goes right through because it's alluvium. There was at one time a river that flowed right there so it's all just big cobble rock, lots of big gaps between. The water just almost infinitely seems to just pour into there. You're not going to have a problem with the water sitting there for even a minute in a situation like that. Other places you're going to have a lot of clay, a lot of other rock and the water doesn't infiltrate, so you have to think about your infiltration rate. You're hoping for that water to go in over time. So that's a really important thing to think about too.
One thing you can do just as a homeowner, you can get a little jar and dig up some soil, a couple feet down. Put that in the jar and shake it around and then set it down and let it settle. After a while, you'll see how it's settled. You'll have the layers. Is it an inch of rocks and another inch of clay on top of that? That'll tell you what your soil is made of. But you can also do a perk test. Dig a hole a couple feet deep, fill it up with water, see how long it takes for that to go through in the driest part of your year and in the wettest part of your year. Right now, it's been raining and raining really hard. If I were to dig a hole and wait for the water to drain out, that would be the worst case scenario. That's as slowly as water's probably going to perk into my environment. When in doubt, ask somebody who knows more than you.
You also need to think about the destination. This is another engineering thing. Where does that water go? If it can't go right into the ground right there, if you don't live in a rural area with alluvial soil where you are sure the water will run right into the ground, soak in. If you live in more of an urban area, suburban, you have to think about where that water goes if it does overflow. You don't want it to overflow into your basement or in your neighbor's basement. It's going to go into the storm sewer, so that might need a pipe to that storm sewer from your rain garden. And that's where you might want to engage the services of a more professional designer. Or it might be able to overflow into the gutter sort of naturally.
Leslie: So tell me this now, Cathy, what if I just have a place in my yard that's driving me crazy. The water seems to settle there. It's only two or three feet. It's yards and yards away from the house or any utilities. Really simple. Like me, let's dig it out, put down some sand, one of those PVC pipes that has holes in it? What are some very simple things that somebody could do? And once we're done with that, soil on top? And let's get to plants! Let's get to the fun part.
Cathy: Yeah. Well, all that stuff I'd love to give you just like a quick formula for how to do the pipes and the sand and all that, but that's really going to depend on your local environment.
Leslie: Oh, darn.
Cathy: What are your soils? How fast does the water go in? All that. And we could try to solve an example.
Leslie: Well, let's just solve that example of a tiny and very occasional problem and let's pretend it's medium soil. Not too clay, not sand.
Cathy: Well, again, you're 10 feet away from your house before anything's going into the ground. So you're either taking your downspout all the way out there, 10 feet, or you've got something so that it's impermeable for that 10 feet. And then if you use a pipe, you want to have the holes facing downward. Some people do that wrong. They'll put the holes on the top. That means the water has to get all the way to the top of that pipe before it can drain. If you want to catch it sooner, you might want to put some gravel below that pipe. Working downward and below that gravel, oftentimes you might decide to do like a barrier of some kind. In some projects, I have used a spun bonded woven kind of fabric as a kind of a weed block or as a way to keep other smaller particles of soil from seeping in and clogging everything.
Leslie: Oh, right. Okay. Yeah. That makes sense.
Cathy: Clay soil and stuff, so you might even wrap the pipe all the way around so that if you have little teeny particles of clay that get into the water and that's going to start to clog your pipe too.
Leslie: And what are some of the favorite plants that you employ when you make a rain garden?
Cathy: I love so many different plants. I'm just going to take an example. I was thinking this morning as I was walking. I live near Reed College and they have a lot of great plants there that are native to the Pacific Northwest. I was thinking about the Western redcedar. It's a great tree that is actually here locally. I've used it in a rain garden. So I'll start with a tree, the Western redcedar. And then just thinking about two other plants that would go in that pallet would be a Snowberry.
Leslie: A Snowberry? What's the Latin name on that? I don't think I know that one.
Cathy: Symphoricarpos albus. Snowberry.
Leslie: I definitely don't know it.
Cathy: I'll send you a picture of it. You can add to this. Birds love it. And then another plant I thought about, which is a fun bulb that you could probably still get away with putting in the ground before it gets too late in the year. It's called Camas. You may know that one.
Leslie: Oh, do they call it ... is the Latin Camassia or Quamash?
Cathy: Yep. Same thing.
Leslie: Yeah. That'll sit in water. Yeah. I have some of that in my boggy place.
Cathy: They don't look like anything at all when they're not in season, but they're so beautiful and native. If it came to it, you could eat that. Camas was a native food.
Leslie: Oh! I did not know that. I've talked about it on the show before, because it is one of the few bulbs that will sit in wet. It's about 12, 16 inches tall and it has a beautiful sort of almost elongated .....you would think, oh, that's a hyacinth flower, all stretched out, but it's not. It's really pretty, and it seems to perennialize pretty well if it's happy.
Cathy: I think it will naturalize. It doesn't go away. It stays pretty well. It's a good, permanent plant. And just a note of caution that there is a plant called Death camas. So if you're out in the wild and you're like, Ooh, Camas. I heard it was edible from Cathy Corlett. Well, there's also a Death Camas, so maybe just leave that camas alone.
Leslie: All right. Good to know.
Cathy: The natives in the valley would come and dig those as a wonderful staple.
Leslie: And have you eaten them?
Cathy: I once did, when I was working at the Natural History Museum.
Leslie: What was it like?
Cathy: A cross between a potato and an onion.
Leslie: Okay. So you actually eat the bulb, not the foliage but the bulb?
Cathy: They would eat the bulb. They cook the bulbs. The natives would cook the bulbs in earth ovens. You would make a big fire and get some rocks really hot and then put layers of soil in there and then you would put your bulbs in there and more layers and more layers and it would kind of bake in the oven. And then you would have food.
Leslie: Cool.
Cathy: Yeah. Yeah.
Leslie: I'm so glad that I have people like you on my show. This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, and we're talking with Cathy Corlett, who's a landscape architect. Before we run out of time, I want to move on to two things that I have not known too much about, and therefore I'm thinking my listeners might not. Could you define for us and tell us about a couple of that you've done, maybe - an interpretive garden?
Cathy: An interpretive garden. Don't be afraid of this word interpretive. It just means educational really. It's a way of interpreting or sort of translating into human terms what's going on, all the complicated stories that are going on in the world around us, in the natural world. One interpretive garden was there at the Museum of Natural History at the University of Oregon. We had a garden there that was a display of native plants. So a living collection of natives from the Pacific Northwest. There were signs identifying each plant, just a self-guided kind of brochure. You could learn the stories that were attached to those plants. There's many, many stories that Native American uses of those plants for craft and for survival, and the birds that depend on them for migratory food sources, pollinators. Just a teaching garden, really.
Leslie: A teaching garden. And have you done a lot of designs for that type of thing?
Cathy: I have, yeah. It's a specialty. It's an interest for me. I mean, every place has stories. It's just about how you unlock those stories.
Leslie: Do you have a favorite one you could tell us about?
Cathy: A favorite teaching garden?
Leslie: Yeah.
Cathy: Well, there's one where my son went to middle school and we designed a garden that would be a teaching garden where the science classroom has an outdoor space. There wasn't a sufficient funding at the time so hopefully this will still happen, but the students would come out and learn about not only some of the native species, other edible plants that do very well in the Northwest, such as blueberries and other berries, orchard trees, and then have a chance to also over the year be able to arrive in school and you're new and fresh into middle school, and there you are in the fall and there's a lot of things to harvest and eat, and that's very rewarding. And then you get the rest of the year to plant those and learn about. I know a lot of elementary schools also have learning gardens of that kind that's an edible garden.
Leslie: Right. Okay. So that would become considered interpretative.
Cathy: There were many other stories that were part of that garden. The physics teacher could also teach about physics in that garden. There's just a lot you can do with classrooms in the outdoors that we don't necessarily think about. It tends to be a lot cheaper to build an outdoor space than an indoor space. An indoor space, it can be $200 square foot and up. Outdoor space can be $20 a square foot.
Leslie: And can offer just as much education if you do it right.
Cathy: Just as much or more education. It's a little bit more in terms of maintenance, but there's a lot of lessons that you can take outside and I can get really detailed about it.
Leslie: Let's move on to the last mystery. As I said at the beginning of this interview when I started talking to Cathy, she just opened my eyes to a bunch of types of gardens that I just didn't know about. I was looking for the rain garden thing. I had never heard of trauma informed design. She sent me, in the meantime since our first conversation, a wonderful article that was written up. She had participated in a very big project that was taking a church and making it as a place for people who were temporarily homeless. Although I'm a garden girl, it was almost easier for me to see. Maybe there were just better photographs of the inside, how they took that nave and that big space and it's all soft and welcoming and closed off and yet open. And you must have done something similar on the outside. So tell us about trauma-informed gardening.
Cathy: Well, trauma-informed gardening as such, it's kind of a new term, but it also has a lot. The Venn diagram is kind of complicated. It overlaps a lot with therapeutic design gardens that have been built at many hospitals that kind of bring the spirit of the place in so that people can feel refreshed and get into better health by being in touch with the natural world. So there's a lot of those principles involved with trauma-informed design. Trauma-informed design is a term that's been applied more in interior spaces. Of course, the exterior space does have a lot of wonderful soft features to it. With a lot of gardens, you can't really take great pictures of them until 5 to 10 years after they've been installed.
Leslie: That's true.
Cathy: Little places that you're surrounded. You can have your back to the shrubs or the fence line, just exposed. That safety can be increased also by the shade or the tree canopy that we've installed, the sense of peace and calm and kind of warmth. We worked with a lighting designer who had some lights that she picked that were very warm. Not like a warehouse or a car lot or whatever where it's a really white light that's really high up, but the opposite of that is more of a warm, low light. It's lower down closer to you so it feels just kind of cozy, a lot of those principles. And using curves and soft edges so no hard, sharp edges. You can imagine why that's not necessarily ... traumatic might seem like a strong word, but it's nicer and softer and more joyous to have a curve.
Leslie: Right. So it sounds dramatic, but it's ironic that the entire impact of it is supposed to be to get away from the drama and bring in coziness and security and peace for the people who might have been through something that was not very pleasant.
Cathy: Yeah. And autonomy is another principle that's applied there.
Leslie: And what would be a good example of autonomy and that kind of thing?
Cathy: Like movable furniture, chairs that you pick up and take to where you want to sit, places that are a little flexible that you can use in a way that you might want to. If you want to go talk to your friend and you want to go sit over there when people can't overhear you, so it doesn't feel like there's some overlord policing everything you're doing. It just feels like you have freedom.
Leslie: A nook and a cranny to be in nature. Do you have time in your busy life to actually garden, Cathy?
Cathy: I do have a busy life, and one of the things that makes it busier is that I am absolutely dedicated to having gardening being part of that.
Leslie: Oh. Ornamental or veg or both?
Cathy: All. Everything. My little piece of heaven right here in Portland is it's a little bit of a larger lot so that's great. The front has a lot of sun, so we've got plants that I can eat. There's herbs and I'll plant seasonal vegetables in the front, but that also is overlaid with plants that are attractive to birds and to pollinators because a lot of those plants like the sun as well. And then around the side and the back, we've got more shade so then this is more ornamental. We have a Japanese maple that's been here since the house was built, probably in ...
Leslie: How long then?
Cathy: The 60s.
Leslie: Oh, nice. So really mature.
Cathy: It's really mature, and it's really the perfect size for the backyard so that's kind of THE feature of the backyard and the existing lawn there with that. I haven't yet taken that lawn and done a whole lot with it because it's like, well, I better be real careful about that cause I know that the roots of that tree are all spread out into that lawn and it likes how it is so we'll see. I'm thinking about adding... I'd love to do swabs with bulbs under there. There's all kinds of things you could do that you can just make it richer and richer and more interesting.
Leslie: Yeah. Well, your kids are grown? No, they're still in the house, right?
Cathy: My son is 18, so he started college, so...
Leslie: Oh my goodness. You look way too young for something like that. Maybe that'll give you a little bit more time though to get out there. That's very cool. What I was going to say when I ask that is just that you and me and everybody is listening to this, we all know how it makes us feel to get our hands in the dirt and to be out there in the sunshine and seeing and listening to the birds and it's just so happy. Studies have shown that it's literally so good for you. And so I think it's wonderful that you're designing things that make it so somebody who's in the part of their life that can't really think about gardening can actually enjoy some of that. Maybe they're not sticking their hands in the dirt, but they're surrounded by it. And so the trauma-informed garden would really help with something like that, wouldn't it?
Cathy: Yeah, absolutely. A trauma-informed garden. Anybody can apply those principles that help you, even if you don't identify as someone who's gone through remarkable levels of trauma. Getting out there, just getting your hands in the dirt. There's also a fountain at the project that you mentioned that's for people who have experienced homelessness so you can touch the water that's coming out of the fountain. Kids do and then they took the rocks and painted little things on them, which was like, oh, that's a surprise. So just interacting with things and feeling trusted to do so, and not feeling like there are rules that they are going to break.
Leslie: So many gardens have to say, don't touch, don't touch. And obviously something like what you're designing would not do that at all.
Cathy: No, you shouldn't just go out there and whack away at things randomly, but come taste the parsley that I've got growing. Come pick some. There's people walking by. This is not too busy, but there are a lot of people walking back and forth. We have a Trader Joe's down the street so it's like come, have a flower. I always plant annual flowers out front that it's kind of like let's have enough that there should be an abundance of that kind of thing. If you've ever grown calendula, you'll have a thousand more and then share the seeds, just go for it. It's a great plant.
Leslie: The Verbena bonariensis is one of my big ones and I have a ton of Columbine, and now for a garden that's only seven years old, I'm seeing what's happy there and especially the Salacia. Oh my God. Thank you so much for coming to talk with me about these three topics that I was pretty ignorant about. Thank you, Cathy.
Cathy: Thank you, Leslie. It's been a pleasure.
Leslie: This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA and we'll be right back with the playlist, what to do in your garden right now.
Leslie: Welcome back to Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, sponsored by Colorblends bulbs. Well, what did we learn there in that interview? The basics of rain gardens for sure, but it sounds like there's much more to be discovered on those. And it seems to me that you should probably have the facts available to your particular property and water situation to help guide you on decisions of how to proceed with a rain garden, if it's going to be big or near your house or near a neighbor's house. And in those cases, you might want to enlist the help of a recommended professional. It sounds like you couldn't get into too much trouble taking advantage of a little wet spot on your property away from buildings, but if you're thinking of taking on something more ambitious that could involve tree roots and sewer lines.... Well, I don't want to rain on your rain garden dreams, but do take care. I'm going to include some photographs of some of the spaces that Cathy has designed on the blog that goes with this episode on LHgardens.com. I had heard of therapy gardens, but never of trauma-informed gardens, and I really enjoyed learning about both.
Questions from listeners. Well, let's go back to irises for a second. Sally Burnham asked if the new little irises that she had just bought and planted would bloom this year. And my answer is probably not if they're not repeat bloomers. But if they are, you might get a surprise bloom later this year if they settle in quickly. Sally also asked about my favorite hydrangea, the Hydrangea arborescens 'Annabelle'. She asked if they would bloom in the shade, and the answer to that is yes. I have Annabelles growing in all conditions in my garden and the ones in full sun, they flower like mad and in fact, those are the ones that I cut a lot for rebloom. Some grow in semi shade and they flower just fine, and some grow in deep shade and they produce a few flowers. Nothing to brag about, but the white flowers do really pop out in the darkest corners of my garden.
A couple of other people asked about getting rid of invasives. Elizabeth Hayes has an issue with Marsh Marigold or the Caltha palustris and Chameleon plant, which is the Houttuynia cordata. These are very tough plants indeed. Actually, you know what? I've read about the Marsh Marigold, but I don't have firsthand experience with that one. I sure do with the Houttuynia. I first saw it in a garden I was touring in England, and of course, I don't remember which one, but I thought it was such a charming looking ground cover. It's variegated with not just cream and green, but also a sort of a dark pink. Grows about six inches tall and it forms a thick mat. And then I saw it growing later at a client's house, and I really liked the looks of it still, but I was beginning to understand what kind of plant it was and the bloom was off the rose for me in terms of the Houttuynia in terms of deeming it a worthy garden plant.
It's very aggressive and really difficult to dig out because you just are always leaving roots behind. We were instructed to dig it out of this client's property, and parenthetically I did of course take some home and plant it, but I knew enough to site it very carefully. My advice, if you want to grow this plant and it is really charming looking is use a pot. I actually am lucky I have this place. It's about eight by eight. It's an area to the right of our garage that must have been a foundation for a shed at some point, because on three sides of it, it has six inch thick concrete and the fourth side is the garage, so it's a perfect place to plant something like the Houttuynia.
But not everybody has six inch concrete walls in which to accommodate charming looking invasives so let's get back to Elizabeth's problem. She wants to get rid of both of these invasives. The Marsh Marigold or Caltha palustris is a native plant so if it's simply existing with your perennials, Elizabeth and not hurting them, maybe you could just keep it if you don't mind the looks of it. But if you want to get rid of it, and it sounds like they're in amongst your perennials and you don't want to hurt them, well, let's see, herbicide is clearly not going to help. So I see two choices, well sort of more than two, but none of them is particularly good. One is to dig everything up and try to separate the roots of the bad from the roots of the good. That's tough. If you feel like you can't separate it, you can't see it, or it's just too much, you could burn it or bag the whole lot and start again.
How about this one? If you wanted to, remember that plants need to photosynthesize to live so if it's a small enough area that you can just cut off or pull the foliage so that there is none, maybe once or twice a week possibly for the rest of your life - I hope not - the plant will certainly diminish and eventually die. So that method is far less athletic, but far more maniacally determined. Yes, I think that's what you will need. Maniacal determination to do in a plant like that. Two other options I guess, would be to live with it or move house.
As I said, I don't know much about the Marsh Marigold, but do consider keeping it now that you know that it's a native. Maybe you knew that before. If trying to get rid of it is even worse than living with it, maybe it's okay. I'm sorry. There's no easy fix, Elizabeth.
Mrs. Kay Botello on Instagram asked about getting rid of invasives because putting them in the compost pile just spreads seeds or spores, and that's an issue because she only does cold composting like I do, and they'll survive. Julie's Garden Diary on Instagram answered her by suggesting either putting them in the trash or burning them. And I agree, but I just would like to add that if it's early spring and the plant has not formed flowers or seeds, then of course you are fine to cold compost it. So great that you all are being good stewards of your land and getting rid of your invasives.
Julie's Garden Diary also asked what are the best plants to pair with Canna lilies in containers. Well, gosh, that's a great question, but you know, I think what makes you happy, but here are a couple things to think about. Your Canna lily will clearly be the thriller, so I would go for a shorter plant unless you have a huge pot and I would go for a different texture. I feel like you have lots of choice on color because whatever color the canna blooms, the look will mostly be foliage, mostly green, because that's what those are. Of course, your container should have drainage, but it doesn't have to be really good drainage in this case. Cannas don't need to dry out and in fact they can stay wet. And if it does have good drainage, just make sure you water a ton.
And what are some other annuals that don't mind sitting in a bit of a bathtub? Let's see Coleus, ferns, caladiums or carex. They would all look good. Now that I think of it, I'm definitely warming to the topic. Here's a great combo in terms of three distinct textures. That could be your canna with your big tropical leaf and then a coleus with sort of a middle size leaf and maybe some pink or red in that coleus just to give it some opposite color. And then maybe one of those lime green carricks. The ever-gold would be great. I hope that helps.
And lastly, Extraordinary Botanicals asked about newspaper pots. You must have seen my newspaper pots in a reel that I did a few weeks ago, but I got that idea from Tanya Anderson. You take a jam jar and you wrap newspaper around it. And then you jam the extra paper inside of it. Then you take the newspaper out of the jar or the jar off of the newspaper, and then you mush up the bottom and then you have sort of a pot. I was actually going to do it for a Tuesday tip , but Jeff filmed me doing it and then I had a look at it and it reminds me of how deplorable my Christmas wrapping skills are. I am one of the reasons that people sell Christmas bags in which to put presents. So I got self-conscious and I didn't post it. But me being self-conscious is almost as silly as the notion that anybody would care. So maybe I'll do that tip, but I have to give credit to Tanya Anderson of the Lovely Greens as I learned it from her, and also she does it much better than I do. You can see her do it properly and neatly. She probably wraps a really good Christmas present too. I'll put a link to her method on the show notes. She did a YouTube video about it.
And what did I do in the garden this week? Well I had a garden party, and it went really well. I mean, honestly, your garden could be a disreputable mess with old beer cans lying about if the azaleas and the dogwoods are blooming and you serve up a little booze and people would still be happy, right? I think we're just happy to be outside again after winter, and we're just happy to be having parties again after COVID. These were ladies from my garden club in Connecticut, which is called Green Fingers, which I joined probably almost 20 years ago. They came to Charlottesville to see Historic Garden Week, but they also saw some really lovely private gardens, and of course, Monticello with the wonderful Peggy Cornett who has been on this show a couple of times.
But what did I do that could be useful to you? I did lots of snapping of seed heads off of spent tulips and daffodils. Oh, and this was fun. Moss grows on my terrace and it looks kind of cool, but it gets determined and it can be slippery so I have to knock it back from time to time. And as I was tidying up the terrace for this party, I realized that these little pieces of moss could be sort of put together on the surface of the soil of some of my potted plants and gee, that looks so good. There were house plants that were not particularly robust after a winter in my care, and I just layered the beautiful moss around the plant like a verdant sort of mulch and it made a huge difference. I'm going to be curious to see if it likes its new home in the various pots and if it knits together. I'm going to keep an eye on it.
I am eyeing a couple of my way too big azaleas and I'm going to give them quite the haircut after they finish flowering. They don't need it for any horticultural reason, but they're just getting too big for their britches. Don't forget that an excellent time to prune spring flowering shrubs is within a month or so after they've bloomed so that after their haircut, they have time to form next year's buds and you don't have to miss a year of flowers. I'm such a silly old woman that after carefully collecting last year's moon flower and hyacinth bean seeds, I proceeded to put them somewhere. I don't know where, and they seem to have dematerialized. So I hopped onto Select Seeds and I ordered those two packets, but why wouldn't I have a bit of a crowd on my cedar staircase railings this summer. So I added Morning Glory 'Heavenly Blue', and a Sweet Pea named 'Flora Norton' that is a soft lavender. It's been years since I brought sweet peas from seed. I get sort of spoiled because I have this perennial one that grows on a tudor. It's a middling to strong pink so I think the lavender color might look good with it and then I'll put some on my rails too. You know, the perennial sweet peas don't have anywhere near as good a scent as the annual ones do.
I have grown hyacinth bean vine and Moonflower vine together so many times, and that combination brings me great joy, but adding a few colors and textures will be nice so the morning glory will look great. And then I even have some of our native Passion flower vine starts that I just picked up at a nursery and I'm going to add those. It will be a merry crowd if I could pull it off and keep things watered. My pansies and violas made it through those two summery hot days of 90 degrees, and to reward them for being tough in the heat, I think I'll let them stay until the temperatures go up again. I'm a proud pansy and viola parent, so positive reinforcement for them. They get to stay and play my little game.
On the bulb front, the daffodils and tulips are over, but the Camassias are holding strong and the alliums are shooting up and showing great promise. I love my Colorblends bulbs, so while I'm on that subject, let me just say that Colorblends is a third generation bulb company offering top size flower bulbs directly to ambitious residential gardeners and landscape professionals at wholesale prices. I like to feel I am ambitious and I buy my bulbs from Colorblends every year.
So I think I need to stop talking now and dig in the dirt, but this was really fun. If you have any questions or comments or corrections, please reach out to me at Instagram. I am Leslie HarrisLH, or my website, which is lhgardens.com . And if you go there, have a look at the blog that accompanies this podcast, add your comments and consider buying me a coffee to help support the podcast. Thank you for rating and reviewing Into the Garden with Leslie on the platform that you use, and I'd like to shout out Rebecca Mullan from Nashville who wrote 'So good. A new favorite. Leslie's candor and sense of humor, the overall pace and tone of the podcast is so, so good.' Gee, I'm pleased to hear that, because sometimes I get told that I talk a little fast. Sorry about that if you feel that way. She says, I feel like I'm listening to a friend who is so kind to share so much knowledge. Such a gift, and I've learned so much.
Well, Rebecca, you have reciprocated that gift with a lovely gift of your own and thank you for that review and I really appreciate it. I'd like to thank our sponsors, Colorblends bulbs. I name this show Into the Garden with Leslie because I am really into mine. Well this week, I am really into the irises in my garden, and I want to get you into yours. So I'll see you next week.