I can always count on the garden to provide early June birthday flowers for a close friend and neighbour. This year, I started out with three climbing hydrangea flower heads in a vase to serve as lacy stem holders for red valerian, single and double peonies and small, fragrant blooms from a climbing Laura Ford miniature rose.
There are more than roses to look forward to in the month as German, Siberian and Dutch irises flower and Oriental poppies make a brief but splashy show. The food garden is plump with fine feasting on lettuces and other leafy greens, little heads of ‘Aspabroc’ broccolini, the first young carrots and luscious strawberries. Garden life is good in June.
Father’s Day. Fathers, like mothers, come each with their own gardening passions. Some gardening dads love cooking, and may appreciate a windowsill ensemble of potted herbs, seeds for winter vegetables or a book on cooking from the garden.
Most guys I know love gadgets. Giving them a hedge trimmer, leaf blower, lawn edger or tiller is bound to ensure hours of amusement. Or, there may be a hand tool lacking in Dad’s repertoire of gardening aids. Comfortable hand cultivators are invaluable, as is a nifty pair of sharp hand pruners (secateurs) or half-circle supports to easily shore up favourite perennials needing help in maintaining an upright position.
Appealing garden books abound, among them publications sure to fit Dad’s special interests. For pure pleasure reading, here is a recently published title that I think will delight a wide range of gardeners.
Heart & Soil: The Revolutionary Good of Gardens, by Des Kennedy (Harbour Publishing, 240 pages, paperback, $24.95) is a perfect gift book. Its series of brief reflections on the pleasures, frustrations and healing to be found in gardening can be savoured at leisurely intervals.
The writing, lyrical and elegant, is soul-soothing. There is exuberant joy and rollicking humour, and from our point of view as gardeners, Heart & Soil meets us exactly where we live as we confront ivy and horsetail, aphids, “neighbourhood cats and freebooting raccoons.”
“All manner of bugs, birds and beasts feel entitled to free lunch from the fruits of our labours, each with a particular genius of thievery.”
Many of the book’s selections strike a strongly empathetic chord with my own life as a gardener. “Broad Appeal” delights in the “ease of cultivation” and “many culinary uses” of the broad bean, a “versatile broad-shouldered work horse of the vegetable patch.” My thoughts precisely.
In my rambling, unruly garden, there is really no time (or inclination) for coddling troublesome and miserly plants. As time goes on and patience thins, my fallback position in this regard is ruthlessness — a theme in Chronic Underachievers, in which various sulky plants are discussed. On a rosybloom crabapple: “Notwithstanding a splendid rosy blossoming each spring, it was a tree of weak and sour disposition, given to numerous ailments and complaints.”
To shore up the determination to terminate a plant, Kennedy advises: “Let it be done during dormancy, before any hint of new growth starts again fashioning the illusion of radical change for the better.”
The controlling nature of gardeners — we who prize “vegetative docility” — is explored in Out of Control, while Extreme Makeovers touches upon the propensity of many to be “never quite satisfied with things the way they are.”
Garden foolishness and gullibility are not avoided. One story tells of a feckless fellow growing military-like rows of opium poppies in plain view, behind chain link fencing. The planting was noticed.
A newspaper story about the Viagra-like effects of drinking tea brewed from winter heather blooms had “men old enough to know better fighting over the last remaining trays” of the plants, until “it dawned upon the legions of newfound heather zealots that the story had appeared on the first day of April.”
GARDEN EVENTS
Rose meeting. The Mid-Island Rose Society will meet on Monday, June 16, at 7:30 p.m. in the Heritage Church, 7244 Lantzville Rd, across from the Legion in Lantzville.
Bamboo workshop. The City of Victoria recreation department is offering a workshop on choosing and caring for bamboo on June 21, 9:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m. Spend the morning at Victoria Bamboo learning about the various types of bamboo and how to maintain and propagate them. See about 30 bamboo species on display and for sale. Cost for the workshop is $25. For details or to register, contact the Crystal Pool and Fitness Centre at 250-361-0732.