Episode 57 Linda Vater of Potoger Blog, the Hyacinth, Tips on Camellias
Leslie: Welcome to Into the Garden with Leslie here on Newsradio WINA. This show is sponsored by Dos Amigos Landscaping. I'm Leslie Harris, and I'm sitting in my car. I drive an electric vehicle and I got a little stuck, so I'm getting it charged while I record this podcast. Our plant of the week is one that is filling my house with scent these days. I wish I had brought one in my car. I'll be chatting with Linda Vater of Potager blog about her new book, which is called The Elegant and Edible Garden, and the playlist is about what to do in your garden this week, and also questions about bulb planting. This is an interesting one. Can I plant bulbs now? Yeah. So we'll get to that later in the show. Oh, and camellia care and pruning in general.
I had something very unusual happen in my garden this week, and it was a film crew. Anybody out there watch Virginia Home Grown? I do whenever I remember to. It's on PBS. It reaches most of Virginia. The co-host is Keith Nevison who was with me and then Peggy Singlemann does a great job. She's the main host, and they work out of Richmond. They talk about Virginia garden communities, all kinds of farming and gardening and trees and all sorts, and in my case, it was all about pruning. I was really excited to show them some of the techniques that I use. I could talk for hours about pruning. This is only going to end up about 10 minutes long, but instead of just listening to me, you can see me on this, pointing out some things, and you might learn a bit more. I speak particularly about boxwoods and four different types of hydrangeas. It's always great to see them actually next to each other to help keep them straight. Jenny, the English Springer spaniel may end up on the cutting room floor. Hard to know, but she could well make it so have a look, and I will put links in the show notes.
Before we get to herald a great plant of the week, let us defame a lousy one. You've heard me mention the organization, Blue Ridge PRISM. It's a local organization and maybe you have one where you live, but their mission is to educate people about invasive plants, because if you know what they are, you can help get rid of them. They put out some information this week on the callery pear, and as I was driving to Richmond, which is where I'm sort of stuck, stuck with a latte and a charger with my car, I was looking at all the ones that are in bloom right now.
Ah! It's such a nasty tree. I mean, it's a beautiful tree and it's blooming right now. So here's what Blue Ridge PRISM had to say about it. With its oval shape, white flowers, attractive fall foliage and tolerance for difficult growing conditions, Cleveland Select has been long loved by landscapers and homeowners alike. Unfortunately, this tree has escaped cultivation and poses a major threat to our forest and native plants. Despite this, the callery pear and its cultivars - and there are many - including Bradford, Aristocrat, Cleveland Select, and Chanticleer continue to be sold by nurseries in Virginia and elsewhere. That's a big headache.
Native to China, the callery pear, especially the Bradford, was widely planted in the beginning of the 1960s, and I actually remember my dad loving them in spring because they cheered him on in his commute. He would come home and say, oh, such a pretty tree. That was the early 70s, probably just before they were beginning to keel over, because that's what they've done and there aren't that many of them left. Nobody is dumb enough to plant them as a landscape plant on the streets. They literally will take down power wires willy-nilly, but people are still selling them and planting them.
It's funny that I would remember that about my dad. We were not a plant family. Gardening was a chore to do. Little love and certainly not a topic of discussion, but I do remember him liking that tree. So plant nurseries could not seem to sell enough of them despite their unfortunate characteristics. They're short lived. They break very easily in storms. The flowers, although beautiful at a distance, have an unpleasant scent, compared to rotting fish. This is still written by the Blue Ridge PRISM. I like the comparison; it gets the point across. Now our forests are paying the price for Bradford pears' popularity.
So I've said this before that we all as gardeners have a tiny bit of power individually when we shop, but that would translate into a huge amount of power collectively. If you see something that you know to be an alien, invasive plant being sold at your local store - good luck at a big box store, but maybe it's worth a try - but you might want to point out ever so politely, so politely that you would love to see more native plants being sold, or even just alien plants that aren't invasive, that don't invade our forests and wild spaces. If we all say that, kindly and politely and over and over and over, I bet you change what happened. So let's all do that, okay?
And now let me climb down off of my soapbox. I'm not as nimble as I once was, but here I land on the ground to talk about the plant of the week. The plant of the week is the hyacinth. It's another cheerful spring bulb, and another - guess what? Non-native! I think this is my longest string ever of non-natives as the plant of the week, and that is terrible, and I promise to break it next week. I was just speaking to a group of ladies at the James River Garden Club last night in Richmond, and I was saying to them, and I really mean it, that my next thing that I really want to concentrate on is to get my garden full of beautiful spring things that are native to our area. They're out there. They're just not commonly sold in nurseries, but I know that I could find them if I really put my mind to it, either to share or somewhere to buy. But the easy things to buy are these beautiful bulbs that you can buy from anybody - the hyacinths, the daffodils and what else have I talked about lately? The Eranthis hyemalis and the Blue Squill and all these things that are certainly not dangerous to us, and we enjoy them in the garden. So no problem there, but it would just be nice to incorporate some native things in my early spring garden, so that's a goal for me.
The Hyacinthus orientalis, and it is native to Southwestern Asia, was then introduced to Europe in the 1500s and what's not to like about it. So it becomes happily ever after something that I buy and millions of gardeners buy every other year to add a few more. These are fat bulbs to plant in the fall. They become a single fleshy stem, lined with lots of curly, curly blooms, which could be purple or pink or white or yellow or apricot. Even red and orange apparently, although I don't think I've ever seen those, which is just fine with me. Those are not my favorite colors in the garden. Sometimes the stems, which are pretty sturdy, are no match for the weight of the flowers, so the best thing to do is to cut them and bring them in. I promise that's a great thing to do because literally I could be sitting in a far corner of my kitchen, enjoying two stems that are at least 12 feet away, and it's like they're right next to me. They really have a strong and beautiful scent.
This is a fairly early spring bulb, and just like any bulb if you want it to come back, you have to leave the foliage alone to ripen off so that the sun will feed those leaves, feed the bulb and it'll come back next year. It's a strappy foliage, almost as tall as the 6 or 8 inch flower. Oh, and if your hyacinths do have the flops, in the next few years as it begins to peter out, the flowers are not so numerous or thick or heavy, so that stem has a fighting chance of holding them up in your garden, so they're actually quite good. Not such condensed color, but they're actually quite good a few years on in your garden. They want full sun and they can't grow in the wet. Again, we are still so early so full sun in my garden right now is underneath huge trees that won't leaf out for a few weeks yet. Bear that in mind when you're thinking about sun versus shade in your garden.
And guess what? The hyacinth is literally poisonous. Well, you need to know that in case you have any family members - canine or otherwise - with peculiar eating habits, but in general it's good news because deer and bunnies won't eat them. The hyacinth; maybe you should grow it. This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, and coming up, we'll be talking with Linda Vater of Potager blog about her new book. Very exciting!
Welcome back to Into the Garden with Leslie here on Newsradio WINA. We are chatting with Linda Vater, author of a new book called The Elegant and Edible Garden. The Elegant …. The Elegant …
Linda: Tough to say, isn't it?
Leslie: The Elegant and Edible Garden. Welcome Linda. Thank you for coming to chat with me.
Linda: Oh, thank you. It's my pleasure.
Leslie: Just so excited. I would love for you to start out. I was going to start the description like this is what this book is about, but I'm like, no, you read the book. What's it about, Linda?
Linda: Well, I think nothing is more beautiful to me than something that is both utilitarian and also is designed beautifully. And I think that vegetables and edibles are just inherently beautiful, and I don't think that they need to be relegated to their own little spot, you know, their own little designated area in the garden. And once I kind of liberated myself from the idea that vegetables go in one area and ornamentals go in another area, it opens up this whole wide world and blurs the lines between what is edible and what is ornamental, because really I think they're both.
Leslie: I think so too. I know because I've read some of your book that you've been gardening for 30 years. At what point did you decide vegetables don't go here and ornamentals over here? When did you start to mix it up?
Linda: Well, I think it's like anything else. You probably have experienced the same thing. It's kind of not one a-ha moment. It's kind of an evolution over time. When I first started to garden, I knew absolutely nothing. So if my book is about anything, I hope it's about accessibility, that it doesn't make any difference on what scale you garden, whether it's just a few container gardens in a window sill or on your balcony, or if you have a huge, dedicated vegetable garden on the back 40. All of this is accessible to us because we just have to interpret it and put it in the context of our lives. I have a small urban garden in Oklahoma City, and I'm a voracious reader as I think you are too, and I just started reading lots of gardening books. I was inspired by Rosemary Verey's Potager garden at Barnsley House, and I thought, okay, this is huge, but I could deconstruct this and miniaturize it and maybe put a version of it in my own home garden.
Leslie: It was a huge inspiration for you that you included in the book too, and you described it so beautifully when I think you and your husband first go to visit it on a gray cloudy day, and it just was like the sun seemed to be shining inside your head.
Linda: Well, because it was so 3D. It was so experiential and so sensual, so it wasn't just the fact that it was beautiful. It was that it was alive and brimming with vitality and scents and smells, and the humming and buzzing of the pollinators. All of a sudden I could just see myself out there, harvesting in the morning and bringing it back in and cooking it. It became a lifestyle and not just a garden, and I thought, okay, I want this. I want this kind of lifestyle, and if I can't have it on her scale, then maybe I can translate it into an Oklahoma vernacular and put an Oklahoma twang on it and recreate it some way in my Oklahoma gardening. And then when I realized that it was just in and of itself this vegetable garden and I call it my potager, which is an ornamental vegetable garden, was just so inherently beautiful, I realized, oh, well, those vegetables are beautiful. Why can't I just let them kind of break the bounds of earth in my potager and I could use some of those edibles in my front garden? I could use them in different areas of my garden, and then they are what is so, so important to me. They are both functional and utilitarian. I can eat them and they're beautiful.
Leslie: What do you think are some of the most beautiful vegetables that you grow?
Linda: Well, I think of it as the queen bee of the garden. I think nothing is more beautiful than bright light Swiss chard.
Leslie: Oh, yes.
Linda: And again, it's not limited just to the fact that it's delicious and you can harvest it and you can cook with it, but the way it catches the light, it's like a living, painted glass window. When the light shines through it, it's just absolutely gorgeous, and it creates such beautiful color echoes. I've got a picture in my book of the red veins of it planted in a pot along with some trailing petunias, and it just creates beautiful color echoes. But then what I love about it even more Leslie, is that then it expands beyond even that, so it becomes a whole lifestyle because I can cut it and I can put those beautiful stalks into a cut glass ice bucket or something and bring it inside where it catches the light, and then it has just completely navigated the entire spectrum of what I consider beautiful and what I consider to be a garden-inspired lifestyle that transcends the garden and comes inside and outside.
Leslie: No wonder I was enjoying your book so much. You have a very descriptive way of talking about things. I'm like, yeah, I know Swiss chard is beautiful, but it's more beautiful now because of what you just said. That's really cool.
Linda: Awesome.
Leslie: But you do also have a high degree of control in your garden. I've seen photographs of so many. Linda has a wonderful presence on YouTube and also Instagram and her garden is everywhere, and it is one that you just want to get into your head. It is beautiful, but there's a framework. There's a great deal of control, and you use boxwood hedging - mostly boxwood I think - to sort of rope it all in. Tell us about that, sort of the mix up of the not hard lines, because I know you go round on a lot, but the lines and the control versus the word you used in your book was blowsiness, which is very great on the interior. Tell me.
Linda: Yeah, I love the tension between strong architecture created largely by evergreens, and in the case of my garden, it's boxwood, but it could really be pretty much any evergreen and the blowsiness of what it contains. So that beautiful tension is I think just what I love. Here's an analogy I would make. You know the best French fries are kind of crisp on the outside and they're soft and chewy and melted on the inside. It's the same way. I like that in the garden. I love that tension between crisp and manicured, and also ebullient and blowsy and overflowing because it just creates a beautiful contrast that I love, and I think that's what I saw first of all when I went and saw the potager at Barnsley House of Rosemary Verey's. And I didn't know that until I intentionally deconstructed it, that I could have put those words on it. You're a garden designer, you're a garden coach. You know this perhaps intuitively that if you don't have good structure, then in the winter, it's not so pretty. If you don't have a good structure that looks good when everything else is not looking its best, then the garden can fall apart. So I think that's what I like about it. The structure can pretty much always look good in August. When things don't look so good, it still kind of holds its own. It's not quite so demoralizing.
Leslie: Yeah. The August garden can make you feel so …
Linda: Yeah, I know.
Leslie: Those lines do help even if they're soft and curvy lines and I just encourage people. Obviously I do. My listeners know that I make a blog post with every one of these episodes and you can go not only there, but also to Linda's YouTube and there will be links to everything and her beautiful new book on the blog post. This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, and we're chatting with Linda Vater who wrote The Elegant and Edible Garden, which is going to be available soon-ish, or is it?
Linda: Yes, it's going to be available in April, originally March, but because of life, let's just say because the world right now, it's going to be available in April, and I hope to do some book signings and lots of things like this that I'm doing with you. Lots of podcasts and TV and all sorts of things to kind of get the word out, because I think what I love about what you do and what others do with your podcasts and your forums is I think we're all just trying to be garden evangelists.
Leslie: Oh yeah.
Linda: And let everyone know just how wonderful it is to garden. You know, the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. But nevertheless, it just enhances your life in a way that I don't think anything else can.
Leslie: I don't either, and I know that some people don't have that thing that we have where we're literally happier when our hands are dirtier. In fact, I remember when I started my business years ago and I said, I know what. I'm going to get employees who love to garden and they're out there. People like me who have this thing, they love to do it and they're going to get paid to do it, and I hired one at the time, my dear Katie. And Jeff said to me, I think you found the only other crazy person in town. I think that's it. I'm like, no. There are more of us out there.
Linda: Yeah. There are so many of us that would rather have a load of manure for Valentine's day, because we're doing it on Valentine's day. A load of manure than diamonds.
Leslie: Exactly. Exactly. It just makes us so happy. Every Mother's Day, it was like you guys make your own meals. Give me from 9 to 5 in the garden. Bring me lunch, and I'll take a gift certificate to the local nursery.
Linda: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
Leslie: Another thing that I love about your book is you literally wrote … What did you say? You said you had imposter syndrome. You and I have similar backgrounds in that we started gardening just as personal gardeners and I was a teacher for many years and so I am a certified horticulturist. I felt like I had to get that thing because I was … You know, I'm sure that you know at least as much as I do, but I love how you've provided this information and not just in this book but for years, again to get people excited, no matter what their level is. What are some of the bigger mistakes or misconceptions that you've had as you've been learning about gardening?
Linda: I think I was just naïve. First of all, I think I was naïve, and I think I was arrogant in my stupidity and I had not yet been humiliated by Mother Nature or things that I could not control. I stupidly thought that you do it and you create this beauty and then that beauty lasts.
Leslie: Oh yeah.
Linda: And it's not. The thing about gardening that I had to come to realize is it's ephemeral. It doesn't last, and that is the bane and the gift of gardening is that it just doesn't last and you have to enjoy it in the moment, and then you have to recreate. You have to create a new form of beauty that's very seasonally related. And then there's just the very common sense things like beauty doesn't just happen. You have to make an investment in it. In the dirt, in the research. There is just no substitute for doing it yourself and making mistakes. Now I don't feel bad about the number of things that I've killed over the years. I'm proud of the number of things I have killed.
Leslie: Yeah, me too.
Linda: Because those failures taught me something. I'm huge into topiary, and people say, well, what's your biggest category of topiary that you do, and my biggest category is dead topiary. I've killed so many, but that's okay. I try to give people permission to kill stuff because that's how you learn. But it doesn't mean that you didn't enjoy it beforehand. It doesn't mean that it didn't give you a return on your investment. I mean, after all, at some point it's no longer tomato season and those tomatoes go into the compost bin. So I just have learned the beautiful, ephemeral quality to gardening and that's okay.
Leslie: And that's okay. And some people who wouldn't be into gardening - wouldn't be crazy people like us that Jeff didn't think there were very many of - would think of that as like, oh, but that's more work, but for me that's more play. I mean, that's like, I'm gonna go clean up this bush and it's gonna look so much better. This tomato plant has some dead branches. I'm gonna go, and then it's gonna feed me and look good.
Linda: And there's also just a humble acceptance of the fact that something is eating your cabbages, but you can see the holistic beauty of gardening. It's not just one individual thing. It's the entire circular nature of gardening. It's the bugs, it's the pests, because even when something is consumed by a fungal disease, you have to marvel at what nature can do. I mean, even if it's predatory and it's eating and it's ...
Leslie: Destroying a plant that you value.
Linda: You still have to kind of marvel at it and the beauty of nature. And then the fact that there are coping mechanisms that, okay, so how can I naturally combat what is also natural?
Leslie: What are some of the biggest challenges you have in your garden? So you're gardening in Oklahoma.
Linda: I would say if you'd ask me, I could kind of just say, well, are weather extremes here. I not so kiddingly say we garden in the land of Jove and I'm not exaggerating when I say this. In one year, we had record snow, record rain, record winds, record tornadoes, record ice, record earthquakes, and all of that was in one year. And in one area of Oklahoma, there was a 100 degree temperature shift in 36 hours.
Leslie: Oh, so you're saying that in the land of Jove with a V...
Linda: The land of Jove. Yeah. Yeah. Like in biblical terms. What I like to think is part of the reason that people are attracted to what I do is because if I can do it here ...
Leslie: Please, yes.
Linda: You can do it too. Certainly weather extremes, extreme heat, clay soil, just temperature extremes. But now I would say on a more specific level, the big challenge is, and I think this is probably something other gardeners can relate to, it's just getting something established. Just getting it established so it can hold its own. So that means getting that seed to be able to grow before it is eaten by cutworms. Getting that Encore Azalea established and putting out root growth before the heat can get it, or before record low temps can get it, because once it gets a foothold, it's kind of like ourselves as gardeners. Once you get a foothold and you kind of figure out what you're doing, then you can persist, but it's just getting something established.
Leslie: In terms of design, getting something established, we've talked about the framework that you use of boxwoods and you do some garden consulting design for others, right? Do you design for others?
Linda: A very limited amount. I used to do a lot more of it, and I don't have a lot of time to do that anymore,
Leslie: But some basic principles that you could offer our listeners in terms of establishing something. So that would be, if somebody were starting off, how would you start a garden? So it's a yard with trees. You've got some grass, whatever. I always say, okay, we're starting with shrubs. What do you think?
Linda: Oh yeah, absolutely, and allow me a little commercial. I would definitely say buy my book, because what it is is a description of my own pilgrimage of how I started my own garden. I call it my theory of garden relativity, and that is every one thing in the garden is relative to every other thing. So the most common example of that is first of all, the thing that it's relative to is your home, and the style and architecture of your home. It's relative to your geography and your climate. It's relative to where you have light and shade. It's relative to where you have easy access to water. It's relative to all of those things, and so once you start looking at your garden and your landscape through that lens of both practicality and beauty, for example, where do you want focal points? If you walk into your home and you're looking out the living room window, do have a beautiful vista that looks out into the garden? Or do you want something beautiful to look at from your kitchen window as you do the dishes? And so every one thing is relative to every other thing, I walk the readers through a whole list of questions that you ask yourself before you begin. But the easiest answer to that, Leslie would just be just start.
Leslie: Just start.
Linda: Just begin. Just start somewhere, anywhere as a point of reference, because from that you learn and then you learn something new and then you learn something else new.
Leslie: And I read that's how you started your book. I think you had read something like just sit down and write. Don't think; just write.
Linda: Don't think. Just write. Don't think, just write.
Leslie: And your book is so all encompassing. We're gonna talk about it more in a minute. This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, and we are talking with Linda Vater who is an author of a brand new book called The Elegant and Edible Garden. But she's also somebody to reckon with in terms of just regular information. She is a garden evangelist, as she said, like me. The reason I'm doing this podcast is because we talk about what we love and she's done it beautifully. Beautifully photographed and very articulately in this new book, and you go in a lot of different directions and I'd love to, because it's a special love of mine also. I'd love to ask you about the topiary, because there's a chapter, at least a section on that, right?
Linda: Oh yeah. I'm topiary-obsessed. I need an intervention.
Leslie: Do family members … are they concerned?
Linda: They are. Well, about many things. I've got a very large family. I've got nine brothers and sisters.
Leslie: Oh my.
Linda: Yeah. Yeah. So I think what I love about it and I describe this in the book is I love it's childlike appeal because it's kind of how a child would draw a tree, a stick with kind of a fluffy ball on it.
Leslie: The lollipop.
Linda: It's a lollipop. Exactly, and that's kind of some of the terminology that is used. I think we all are inherently drawn to things that are just dollhouse-like, and it's small and it's meditative. I love the Zen of it. Just creating it and clipping it, and I love the fact that it's both an indoor and an outdoor exercise. I just love its appeal. It's very sensual if you're doing herbal topiaries. Are you doing topiaries?
Leslie: I do. I have. I would not compare my collection to yours, but it's a little hobby of mine too. I have a little farm and it's mostly boxwoods. It's kind of funny. In my years of being a professional gardener, you would get to somebody's property and they would always have too much of something so you end up with all these plants, like this Monarda is out of control so you take it home. Who wants some? You can put it in the compost pile, but why waste it? So you know how little boxwoods, they seed all the time.
Linda: Oh, yes.
Leslie: Yeah. So a huge boxwood hedge would have these little babies and I'd take them home and I'd put them in my little hospital bed, and now I have a triangle one and a wall one and a criss-crossy one and lots of lollipops. So yes, they are not things of beauty, and I'd love to ask you about your system because I find that when I have them in my collection of terracotta pots, which makes me happy by my front door, every once in a while, they're like, I'm done with this pot. Could I go back in the ground for a while? And I shuffle them in and out. What do you do to keep them happy in pots?
Linda: The same thing. I shuffle them in and out. One thing that I struggle with is because I like topiaries and I love so many container plantings and I love beautiful vignettes that my own garden can really get too cluttered, because I'm always creating these garden vignettes, and then the totality of the beauty of the landscape really suffers because of that, because it then begins looking too cluttered. So one thing I've started doing is I give a lot of them away. You can only have so many starts, so I give a lot of them away. But the other thing I've started doing is aggregating a lot of them. So if I've got three small ones, I'll put those three small ones in one large pot and do like a series of three of them over a rectangular pot, or just cluster them all together so that three small ones make one big, large one. Or at some point they say you've got a void in your garden and you've got something that can fill that void inexpensively, and I think that that works. The other thing that I think you and I are both passionate about is gardening doesn't have to be expensive, and topiary seems to some like it's intimidating because it's kind of an elevated thing. You see it in all these beautiful books and magazines and things. But so many of my topiary things I've just gone outside and dug up like your little boxwoods.
Leslie: Yeah. If you go at it for years, this little tiny sprig and you just rip off the bottom bits, and sometimes I really torture them by braiding them. I put three together and braid them. I mean, crazy stuff. It's really fun.
Linda: And you begin to look at everything through a topiary lens.
Leslie: You do. Ooh, come with me.
Linda: Or that sad little plant that's $2
Leslie: I could have my way with you.
Linda: I see its potential. So it is just a joyful thing. It's just a joyful thing.
Leslie: That is so fun. Can you think of things in the book that you would love to talk about in the last few minutes, just messages that you would want the listeners to know that this is in here too. It's not just topiaries and it's not just my garden and the mix of edibles, which I think is a really important and wonderful message. Any other messages that we need to articulate?
Linda: I think number one, as I said, it's accessible. There are so many, oh, I can take this page right now and I can execute something from it. No matter what size my garden is, no matter the nature of my garden, I can take one idea here and I can do that, to give you confidence, to do those things. The other thing, and you alluded to this earlier, and I so appreciate it. Gardening doesn't have to be dry. It can really …
Leslie: It's supposed to be fun.
Linda: It needs to be fun. It needs to be sexy. It needs to be sensual, and the other thing I love is that gardening is just a great metaphor for storytelling. There's lots of storytelling in the book that I hope people can relate to, where I'm a little bit vulnerable about points in time where gardening has saved me, and gardening has really informed who I am and that it's not only something you do for yourself and your family, obviously. It's something you do for your community. It's a way to give back, and it's a way to have a relationship in so many different ways. Relationship with nature, a relationship with friends, a relationship with beauty in general. And lastly, I would say that there is no one definition of beauty. I'm not about perfection. I'm about beautification, and there is not just one language of beauty. There are many languages of beauty. You garden with lots of natives and I'm getting into that a little bit more. I'm much more intrigued. I'm intrigued with that, but there is no one language of beauty. You just need to interpret it in a way that speaks to you and your context and what I call "garden fit", and I try to kind of walk the reader through how they can identify what their own garden style is and their own personal "garden fit" that is unique to them.
Leslie: That's fantastic. That's a really good message, and the native thing. Yeah. I love it. I think it's great. I feel like as we get older, we're less about this plant and this pot and this beautiful little section, and more about this land that I'm in charge of.
Linda: Yeah. I have a whole chapter on being a good steward, a good garden steward and what that means, and I think one of the frustrations that I have is I live in a very old neighborhood and in an urban area that sometimes those natives to be really their most impactful, they need to really scamper and roam and I don't have that kind of space, and so I'm trying to think of - maybe you can help me with this - ways that I can incorporate more natives into my relatively restricted landscape, because I just love the poetry of them and their movement.
Leslie: They can be a little difficult to control and the essence of parts of my garden and a lot of your garden is control because of space and that's your style. I would always say natives are great and when you can, choose one. That's wonderful. But Douglas Tallamy, who is the entomologist from the University of Delaware who's made such a wonderful impact on so many gardeners about telling us why this is important, and basically it's important because of the food chain. The native bugs need their plants. I just allay a lot of my guilt because of my huge oak and tulip poplar trees, all of which are native . So I'm like, great. I can have a couple more hostas.
Linda: Well, I think it's easy to be a little bit smug and try to pretend like you're a garden absolutist and whatever, and no, my birds, my bugs, my pollinators, they're happy with whatever I can do for them as long as I'm kind of gardening organically and I'm doing my best.
Leslie: Any gardening is better than no gardening.
Linda: It really is, and I think the more you garden, the more that you want to do it so responsibly, because first of all, it just makes more sense and it's easy.
Leslie: It does, and it's easy to say, okay, not so interested in bugs, which I am strangely, although I'm very ignorant, but I I'm like, oh, bugs. Bugs are cool. But most people are like birds. Yes, and when will the birds come? When you get the bugs.
Linda: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I've got a friend who works with me, and I call her the bug whisperer.
Leslie: Oh, nice.
Linda: So, if I want to squish a snail or something, I have to do it when she's not looking
Leslie: Linda, this has been so fun to get to know you. I really appreciate your time. Thank you so much for visiting with me.
Linda: Oh, absolutely. Thank you.
Leslie: Yeah. We had a ball. This is Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA, and coming up next, we'll be talking about what to do in your garden this week.
Welcome back to Into the Garden with Leslie on Newsradio WINA and it's time for the playlist. How to play in your garden this week. Linda's new book is beautiful on the outside and on the inside, just like her. I really had a great time chatting with her. She's a lovely, lovely person. If you would like to own it, all you have to do is go to my website, LH gardens to either buy it or enter the giveaway to get it for free, and all the links that you would need to see more of Linda and the Potager blog are there too.
I got a bunch of questions this week. None of them were fabricated by me, if you're keeping track of that. Brittany from Instagram asked if she could plant bulbs right now, and now is late winter, actually, almost about to be spring for those of you who are listening in the future, and the answer is maybe. It's always best to plant them in the fall, but if they have been in a cool place all winter, not like, oh, the heater doesn't work very well in here. I mean, cool like almost outside kind of cool, and if they're still firm, but not hard like rocks, then they should be fine to plant. They are probably raring to go, so give it a try. Why not? It's not like waiting is better. It would be hard to keep them happy for another six months. So yes, plant them.
Some people asked about Herme. I don't know if that's the right way to say it, but I have a camellia that I inherited. I didn't buy it. It's named well, HERME. How would you say that? I'm thinking like the Hermes scarf, but no s at the end, but little do I know. Anyway, I posted that on Instagram this week, because it was snowing on it and looked really pretty there. These are pink, a kind of a bubblegum pink bloom with white on the edges. Very, very pretty, and Sally from Instagram asked me what I feed them. The answer to that is nothing at all, Sally. They grow right next to my glass porch so I don't even top dress them with compost, because that would be messy. They get absolutely nothing from me except for admiration and plenty of that, and they bloom very nicely.
Somebody else wrote saying that they were having trouble getting their camellias to bloom. Keep in mind that there are two major types of camellias. There's the sinensis. That's a third type, but that's just pretty much good for making tea. I don't know about you, but I outsource my tea-making. The two other types are great to keep track of because it can help you get blooms if you have the right one. If I lived north of here, I would grow the Camellia sasanqua. The Camellia japonica is what has just finished blooming now, so that's kind of a winter, very, very early spring blooming camellia. And it works for me because I live in Virginia and the plants are right next to this heated glass porch. They're out of the wind. The blooms did turn brown a little bit faster because of the snow that fell on it and the very low temperatures last week. I usually get 10 days worth of bloom. So these were like, oh, we're pink and now we're brown, but that's okay. I still got some blooms.
If you grow in a colder climate, it's not uncommon for the blooms of the Camellia japonica to get zapped by frost and real low temperatures, and you would be so sad. But if you're thinking I don't want to be sad, you might want to look into trying the Camellia sasanqua. You won't lose your blooms on that one because they're formed all summer and into the fall, and then it blooms … well, mine blooms around Halloween so there's very little chance of them freezing off. Either type of camellia appreciates a bit of protection from wind and low temperatures. So again, growing it against a wall or against your house could work very well.
And lastly, somebody who saw this video asked me why I limb up my camellias. In other words, I remove all the lower branches. Mine are about eight feet tall, but they only have foliage from about five feet up. And the reason behind that is simple and selfish, but probably not too common. When I'm sitting on my glass porch, I want to look out into my garden, and since they're growing right against the glass, I want to be able to sit and look out underneath them. I think the reason that that's a good thing to think about is just that when you're enjoying your garden, you can make changes to make things suit you. That camellia would want to have foliage from 2 feet all the way up to probably 12 or 15 feet, but that's not how I want it to be. I think a lot of gardening is control, and then lots of people were wondering if their bulbs would survive the little bit of snow and the real big dip in temperatures that we had last weekend, and by now, you know that they did.
But lots of stems on my daffodils were weakened. They had completely flopped over right after the cold weather and the snow, but after a day or two, they perked up a little bit. Still, they were kind of bent. I guess there was probably cellular damage. I am no scientist. You know that if you listen to this podcast, so I picked a ton of them to bring them in, rather than having them flopping about in the garden. There is such a great scent in the house when you bring in a big bunch of daffodils.
And how did I play in my garden this week? Well, I looked at the next few weeks for how low outdoor temperatures will get, and I saw nothing in the 30s, and I thought very hard about moving some of my current indoor plants outside. As you may know, I am not the house plant whisperer of the world, and I'm always glad to get those things through the winter season and then out the door and out of my care. But you know what? I don't think I should rush it. Low temperatures will come back and I will try to be a patient girl and keep them inside for a little while.
I'm going through each of my beds and checking for weeds. Oh my gosh, there are so many ivy seedlings this spring. I don't know what happened, but a million little tiny ivy babies, and they're all going into the compost pile. I remove sticks and ugly bits. I make sure that the leaves aren't too matted for my little tiny plants that are waking up underneath a nice fluffy layer of leaves. I have several beds where I want a formal look and that's where I remove all sticks and leaves, and I'll be mulching them with double shredded hardwood bark. That's my favorite type. Think about why we mulch. We mulch to one, seal in moisture; two, keep out weeds; three, feed the soil when the mulch decomposes. Leaves as mulch. Well, they might not look as neat to your eye, but they will decompose and pretty quickly too. And number four, we mulch because it looks great, especially hardwood bark. It just gives a bed that neat finished look that I want in some of my garden beds. In my case, it's a small percentage of them. I leave leaves as mulch in most of my garden beds.
Now, if you're listening to this podcast, I know you know about dyed mulch, but just in case, let's check in. You and me, okay? First of all, dyed mulch will decompose and I guess it will feed your soil, but Lord, what will it feed your soil? I mean, I assume that there are chemicals in dye and even before it decomposes, that red stuff, not a great look. Secondly, shouldn't you at all costs avoid the remote possibility of having somebody look at your mulch and then have a CVS parking lot planting pass through their subconscious? I think that should be avoided for them and for you. So no dyed mulch, please.
I'm also cutting back my euphorbia. I grow Ascot Rainbow euphorbia, which is that cool, variegated one with yellows and greens and a ting of pink, and my new little black birds. Everybody took a real big hit this winter. Sometimes they come through just fine and then I remove some of the older bits, but these are all topsy turvy. They really have to go back to the nubbins. I hope they grow back in time for some people coming through on a tour in April. Not historic garden week this time; just a smaller group. Euphorbia has that sap you know, and if you cut yours back, wear long sleeves and gloves and pretend like it's March 2020 and don't dare touch your face, because you could be sorry.
My wonderful arborist came this week to make those cuts on the storm damaged trees. I mentioned to you that clean cuts were needed on those places when I talked about the ripped bark last week, but I don't know if I mentioned why. Trees have been around for millions of years, existing quite happily without us and saws, well, saws are probably a more recent development. Using a saw to make a nice clean cut on damaged, jagged wood simply makes a boo-boo into a smaller boo-boo, and therefore it reduces the nooks and crannies for disease to be able to set in, and so it's better for your tree. So that's the simple explanation behind a clean cut when you're pruning.
Hey, you might want to look at your early bulb clump soon, like for instance, your snowdrops and see if you can go shopping right there for free at that clump. You know the drill. You dig up the clump, you put a third or half of it right back in that same hole, and then you make another hole or two for new clumps. Try to do that the day before rain. Let Mother Nature take care of that part of it. So that's what I've been up to. Seedlings are coming along. Most of them are out in Mother Nature's light right now, which helps because I don't do the grow lights thing. They spend their nights in my cold frame. I'm gonna talk more about that next week.
This week, my needy ask of you is to rate Into the Garden with Leslie wherever you get it, and if you listen on Apple, if you could do a few more clicks and write a nice review, that would be so appreciated. Here's one Fran Boninti. She is a fabulous local gardener here in Charlottesville. I was a little starstruck when she reached out. She said, I am fortunate to live in the same area as Leslie. It's beyond fun hearing about her disasters and victories that we all have been through. Her humor makes me laugh out loud. She's knowledgeable and a super interviewer who allows her guests to speak. Of course, Fran, I allow my guests to speak. They're the experts. She actually wrote much more, Fran did, which I really appreciate, but let me paraphrase by saying that it seems like we see eye to eye on the importance of native plants, offset by a few, not too guilty pleasures of Asian plants that would not escape cultivation and bring us pleasure in our gardens. Fran's garden is actually famous around here. It's remarkable. I have to have her on the podcast to talk about it, right? Just say yes, Fran. This was fun.
If you have any questions or comments or corrections, please reach out to me at lhgardens.com. That's my website or on Instagram @Leslie HarrisLH, and don't forget. If you go to the website, you can enter for the giveaway to Linda Vater's new book. I name this show Into the Garden with Leslie because I'm really into my garden. Spring is coming and let's get you into yours and I will see you next week.