Gardeners' Holidays 2020: Flower Planting

Yesterday was the first May Day in 22 years that I haven't spent dancing up the sun with my Morris team. There was one year we had to do it inside due to thunderstorms, but it took a global pandemic to keep us from dancing together at all. However, we came up with the best substitute we could, holding a Zoom meeting at dawn so we could dance for each other in our own homes and even assembling a May Day video to share with all the folks who couldn't be there to see us perform.

Luckily, there's still one spring holiday that the pandemic couldn't stop: the start-of-spring Gardeners' Holiday. In the past, this has usually been a celebration of asparagus or rhubarb, the two crops that are actually ready to harvest this early. And we did indeed pick some of each yesterday: about four ounces of rhubarb, which went into a crisp last night, and six ounces of asparagus, which we're enjoying tonight roasted with potatoes, eggs, pine nuts, and rosemary.

On top of that, there's one new crop that hasn't come in yet, but is showing signs that it will soon. Our new honeyberry bushes, which we spent this Gardeners' Holiday a year ago prepping the ground for, flowered this spring, and when I went out this morning to hang laundry, I discovered that they actually had tiny green berries on them. So, if all goes well — meaning, mostly, if we're able to keep the birds from getting them all through strategic use of netting — we might actually be able to enjoy our newest fruit crop as early as next month.

But the real star of this year's Gardeners' Holiday wasn't a food crop at all. After years of unsuccessful attempts to cultivate a flowerbed in the front yard — first with a mixture of annual and perennial wildflower seeds, then with perennials only — I finally decided that the only way we were ever going to get a satisfactory mix of flowers in that spot was to pick just a few specific plants that were well adapted to clay soil, plant them in specific spots, and mulch everywhere else. We selected six plants, started four of them at home from seed, and ordered the others from Wit's End Gardens. After some weather-related delays, they arrived on Thursday, very neatly packed and healthy-looking, and so we spent most of today getting them into the ground.

This process involved several stages. First, we pulled out all the existing plants in the area we'd designated for the flowerbed. Brian dug up a few that he's hoping to save — a couple of purple coneflowers that, sadly, weren't in the places where we needed them, and one Siberian wallflower — and set them aside to replant in a little patch in front of our shed. We yanked the rest, then went over the plot with a hoe, and finally dug the entire thing to a depth of a few inches just to make sure we got everything.

After smoothing out the dug-up dirt (with me using a small rake, and Brian just pushing it around with his hands), we took all the plants we had in pots and "dry fitted" them into the spots where we wanted to go. I had already made up a sketch of where I wanted them based on their likely height and spread; however, once we'd roughly placed the pots according to this plan, I had to go over the whole bed with a ruler, carefully measuring and adjusting their placement to make sure they all had as much room as they needed. Eventually we got them all into their designated spots, and we were ready to dig.

Trowels in hand, and treading carefully to avoid stepping on any of the plants, we dug holes for each plant one at a time. For this stage, we relied on the guidance of Liz Ball's Philadelphia Garden Book as to how deep and wide to dig each hole and what to add to it. The sedum and yarrow plants got some sand and gravel mixed in with the dirt to improve drainage, along with a helping of rotted cow manure for fertilizer; the others got just the manure. We watered each plant after placing it and, once we had them all in, covered the whole thing with an even layer of the mulch we bought in March. The tallest plants (purple coneflower and sedum) are in the back, the coreopsis and yarrow in the middle row, and the Lenten rose (hellebore) and little Johnny-jump-ups (violas) in the front.

The project wasn't quite complete at this point, because we still needed some sort of border to demarcate the edges of the flower bed. This would serve a couple of purposes; it would let us know for sure at what point encroaching plants could be considered weeds, and it would keep Brian from straying too close to the flowers with the mower or string trimmer. He originally planned to put up a simple row of stakes connected with twine, but I thought of a better idea. Years ago, when we first dug up the bed where our raspberry canes are now, we found buried against the side of the house a whole bunch of old phone line insulators — mostly clear or blue glass, plus a couple of ceramic ones. We had no idea then, and have none now, what they were doing in there, but they were kind of cool-looking, so we saved them and used them for various projects around the garden. First, we used them to mark off the locations of our newly planted cherry bushes; later, when those were big enough that we no longer considered them at risk, we moved some of them to mark the bases of our hardy kiwi vines. And since those are now big enough to fend for themselves as well, I collected the lot and deployed them around the edges of the new flowerbed, spaced about a foot apart. To make it look nice, I alternated blue and clear ones in the front, then used the remaining clear ones around the side. They're not a true barrier, but they should serve the purpose of reminding us where the flowerbed stops and the weed free-for-all starts.

Now, I guess, all we have to do is keep them well watered, yank out any weeds that make it through the mulch, and hope they eventually grow up into a more presentable flowerbed than we were able to get with the wildflower seeds. I'm mostly concerned about the sedum and hellebore plants, the ones we had to special order; if any of the others don't make it, we can always try growing new ones from seed. So as long as those four purchased plants and at least a few of the others survive and produce blooms, I'll consider this project a success.