Talking to My Plants

Blogging about my garden before most of the plants have arrived turns out to be not my brightest idea ever.  I've been racking my brain trying to come up with ideas for posts.  My colleague Erika suggested I blog about the plants in Central Park, which is a pretty good idea.

But then this morning, I noticed something bloggable about the least likely plant in my garden.

Yup, it's the Dwarf Alberta Spruce.  I've actually been sort of worried about it because, well, I talk to my plants.  So every morning I water my Japanese Maple and tell it what a good, beautiful tree it is.

(I really have to learn to move the furniture out of the photos...)

Then I move over to the Dwarf Alberta Spruce and feel guilty for having let it overhear my lavish praise for the other tree.  So I give it the "You can do it!" speech, but I bet even trees know that  the "You can do it!" speech means you haven't actually done anything yet.  And so I've made my tree feel like a failure before I've even had breakfast.

Maybe I'm overthinking this.

Anyway, this morning, I took a closer look at the brown buds at the ends of the brown branches of the brown Dwarf Alberta Spruce.   Turns out they're doing exactly what buds are supposed to do in the spring.  They're budding.

See those tiny bits of green appearing towards the end of the branch?  Those were not there a couple of days ago.  Some of the other branches have these little sprouts too.

So the Dwarf Alberta Spruce lives.  Maybe it's sibling rivalry with the Japanese Maple.  Maybe it's being outdoors in the cool air that vaguely reminds it of its ancestral homeland, Alberta.  Maybe it's just a tree doing what trees do in the spring.

Or maybe, just maybe, it's the "You can do it!" speech.

In Which Jenn Arrives Bearing Plants

Good houseguests bring hostess gifts.  Really good houseguests read your blogs and dig plants out of their garden to help your blogging projects.

My friend Jenn and her son Jack arrived today, and this is what they brought me.

Yes, that's right, a yogurt container with plastic bags in it.  So why am I so excited?  Because in those bags are two new acquisitions for my garden, and neither of them is dead.

First up: the Bleeding Heart.  Latin name Lamprocapnos spectabilis - a member of the poppy family, native to Asia.  One of those rare shade-loving flowering plants.

These grew behind our house when I was growing up, by a wall between the patio and the kitchen window, right below my bedroom.  So I've always liked this plant, and I'm completely delighted to have something in my garden that's actually blooming.  (Though it may change its mind when it realizes it's just moved a couple of hundred miles northeast!) 

The second plant Jenn brought is a Hellebore (Helleborus orientalis, I think), also known as a Lenten Rose, though it's not actually in any way a rose.

In cold climates, Hellebores bloom in late winter or early spring.  They come in many colors, and I think I'm not going to ask Jenn what color this one will be, so that I can be surprised if and when it blooms.

In thinking about where to plant my new acquisitions, I took some notice of the fact that my Polka Dot Plants are looking pretty frizzled.

I water them daily, but some of the leaves are getting crispy.  I have to assume it's the wind.  Did I mention that in addition to being shady and ugly, my garden is kind of a wind tunnel?

So I walked around, and the least windy place in the garden appears to be on top of my air conditioner.

The new plants, plus the crispy little Polka Dot Plants, are now living on top of the AC.

  

As always, I will keep you posted.  Thanks, Jenn and Jack!

Can This Tree Be Saved?

Be careful of what you make fun of.  I am only a week into this blog, and by making fun of the ubiquitous Dwarf Alberta Spruce, I have brought the wheel of karma crashing into me.

Let me explain.  My law school friend Emily saw my post about how my neighborhood is full of boxwoods and Dwarf Alberta Spruces, and realized that the tree in a pot in her living room (which she and her family had rescued from the trash after Christmas) was yet another Dwarf Alberta Spruce.  It was losing its needles, and she wondered whether I'd like to put it into my garden.

Well, far be it from me to refuse a free plant, plus I figure my penance for mocking Dwarf Alberta Spruces was that I would have to rescue a dying one.  If this were a Very Special Episode of some 1980s sitcom, the tree would spring back to life under my care and I'd learn an important life lesson about not judging a tree by its cover, or not bullying trees that are littler than me, or something like that.

In real life, however, I got to Emily's apartment last night, and we quickly realized that I couldn't carry the ceramic pot that the tree was in.  So we unpotted it (well, Emily did, while I petted the cats), put it in garbage bags, and I lugged it home on the bus.  (Things I love about New York: nobody batted an eye when I got on the bus lugging a tree in a garbage bag.)

It was after 9 last night when I repotted the tree in my backyard, and any pictures I could have taken of the process would have been dark.  But I planted and watered it, and it's been out there all day.

So here's what it looks like tonight.  (I added a little more soil after this photo was taken, but the fact remains that I planted the tree in the corner of the planter, which I guess is a side effect of planting trees in the dark).

Doesn't look so good, right?  But if you look closely, there's a little core of green inside all of those brown branches.

Help Me Pick a Hosta!

I've decided to plant hostas under my Japanese Maple Twig, and I need your help to decide which variety.

The Plants of My Neighborhood, Or, Good Grief, Is That Another Boxwood?

Nothing much has happened in my garden since you last heard from me.  It rained a little, and my polka dot plants are looking nice, and the Japanese Maple is merrily budding away, but any photos would look just like Monday's photos.

So instead, today I'm going to talk about the plants of my neighborhood - specifically, the plants in pots and containers outside of restaurants and stores and apartment buildings.  If you think of New York City as nothing but gray, then you might be surprised by all of these plants.  However, if you live in the suburbs, it might make you sad that all of our urban plants appear to be living in captivity.

What I've noticed walking around my neighborhood the last few weeks is a lot of repetition.  For instance, there's arborvitae.

Arborvitae is an evergreen, recognizable for its flat, feathery needles.  (Forgive me if this is all too basic - I don't yet know who my audience is, and I am pretty much a gardening novice myself!)

The arborvitae in the photo below is no more.  It has ceased to be.  It's expired and gone to meet its maker.  But for some reason, it's still sitting in a pot in front of a restaurant.

There's also the holly.

And the ivy.

And the holly and the ivy.

And the yew.  (Only yew and yew alone.)

The yew needles are soft and flat, and the red berries (if any; none in this photo) are poisonous.

But there are two plants that are just everywhere in my neighborhood.  First, the boxwood.

Now, I get it.  The boxwood is evergreen; it is hardy in this region; and apparently any fool can grow it.  It looks fine whether it's groomed into a topiary or just allowed to grow in a natural shape.  Maybe next year, I'll put some boxwood into my garden.  But I just couldn't get excited about it this year.

And then there's the Dwarf Alberta Spruce.  This one is also ubiquitous.

The needles are short and sharp.

It's like a little Christmas tree in a pot.  Again, I get why it's popular.  It's cute and friendly.  It doesn't need any pruning to give it that nice pyramid shape.  But I just can't get excited about it, and so there won't be any Dwarf Alberta Spruces in my garden this year.

So what will be in my garden this year?  I think I'm going to have to leave you in suspense for a while, or I'll run out of blog posts before the plants actually arrive in the mail.

A quick note: I will sometimes be mentioning brand names in my posts.   I have not received anything free from anyone; everything in my garden is purchased at retail.  If I mention store or brand names, it is only so others can find the same thing if they want to.

Turning an Ugly Back Alley into a Garden... I Hope!

I grew up in the suburbs.  We had a nice yard with plenty of garden space, and as a kid I grew things like tomatoes, pole beans, and snapdragons.  I enjoyed making things grow, and it was pretty easy - all the things I needed (dirt, sun, rain) were right there.

But now I live in New York City, where gardening is trickier.  For starters, most of us don't have outdoor space.  And for those of us who do, it isn't always very gardenlike.

I am very lucky to have outdoor space behind my apartment.  Technically, I only own 10 x 10 square feet of it, but there's a lot more space than that and no one else can access it easily, so I consider it all mine.

When I show my backyard to friends from out of town, though, they seem unimpressed.  Maybe that's because it's . . . gray.  And hard.  And pretty dark.

So that's the view looking left from my back door, as of today.  I thought it might make a nice mini-golf course, but I suspect the neighbors would complain.

The view looking right is marginally more attractive because I've added some outdoor furniture.

It makes a nice extra room in summer, for reading or eating a meal under the stars.  Somewhat lacking in greenery, though, isn't it?  My dream when I moved in was to grow fruits and vegetables and herbs in pots and containers, so that I could cook with my own produce.  But I only get an hour or two of sun per day, and the herbs I tried to grow from seed got to an inch or two high and just... stopped.  So farewell, fruits and veggies.  I am now determined to grow only things that do well in the shade.  Hello, foliage.

Those of you with sharp eyes will have spotted the two varieties of plants I'm growing already.  There's a Japanese Maple that I purchased last year and planted in a self-watering container purchased from Gardener's Supply Company.

OK, perhaps it looks kind of pathetic now.  But it's an Orange Dream Japanese Maple, and will someday have beautiful foliage.  This past weekend, I refreshed its soil, fertilized it with a bit of Osmocote, and mulched it with last fall's leaves and twigs.  (At the top of that big ugly concrete wall is an apartment building with a landscaped back garden, and its trees drop leaves right into my yard in the fall.)

The Japanese Maple is beginning to bud, so I'm hoping to achieve some attractive color even if it is little more than a twig right now.  I also expect to surround it with something prettier than dead leaves.  Hostas, maybe?

My second planting is some pink polka dot plants that were on sale at Home Depot for $1.50 each this past weekend.

They're sitting in their own pot on the table right now, but I think they will eventually end up in one of the bigger pots with a tree or bush at the center.

Five shrubs will arrive in April, chosen primarily for shade tolerance.  I will keep you posted as I try to turn my gray garden green.  And pink.  And orange.

Please respond in the comments with any advice or questions.  And welcome to my gardening project!