Talk about an acid test for landscape plants! This year’s outstanding weather has been the best at being the worst. A one-two-three- and now four-punch to the heart of gardeners’ hopes and efforts.
As I return this week to a neglected garden, after three months of tending my second-home garden in the mild climate of northern England, I’m about to find out how my supposedly weatherproof Mississippi plants have fared. I’m expecting it to not be pretty.
After last December’s sudden, early deep freeze followed by a wet, mild winter which stimulated plants to sprout tender growth a couple of weeks early, then the unexpectedly hard late freeze in March, I thought my plants had had enough. Then this devastating heat and drought.
I’m keeping hope alive because my garden includes species that survived whatever killed the dinosaurs. I grow dozens of plants of which Mississippians have dug up fossils and petrified remains, including oak, magnolia, cypress, palmetto palms, redbud, junipers, maples, and more trees and shrubs, plus ferns, horsetail, elderberry, and other herbaceous beauties. They’ve done well here for eons. So far.
But back in the spring I had to cut down less-hardy winter-damaged plants, including mature vines and a normally hardy shrub from when my house was built over eighty years ago. Others survived but were weakened and, because my garden soil is mostly clay resulting in plants having shallow roots, all more susceptible to severe heat and drought.
I did break one of my personal “don’t water anything” challenges by having neighborhood teenagers come by once a week to look after a few of my most cherished potted plants and herb garden, but I bet even some of those have suffered. But I have zero illusions about my three overstuffed flower beds or the raised bed’s peppers, okra, sweet potatoes, and zinnias. I expect them to be toast. Burnt toast.
But I am a practicing Stoic, which helps me better deal equally with both the good and the bad. While I aim for, and work hard towards, doing well, and celebrate when it happens, I temper expectations with the real-life fact that things often don’t work out even with the best plans, and can always be worse.
I mean, at least I don’t have a lawn that would be demanding the kind of care I am not prepared to provide, so there’s that. If I'd had one, as anyone who pays attention will know, I'd have mowed high and watered twice a month, which is enough for a normal healthy lawn, and hope chinch bugs and army worms skip over my neighborhood. I'd be applying a little reinvigorating slow-release lawn fertilizer or “winterizer” right now, to give the lawn time to put it to use without pushing up against cold weather.
I am steeled to find dead summer flowers; I will simply compost them, work their old mulch into the dirt and replant for fall and winter. My friends in wholesale plant production are having a tough time (imagine having to water thousands of plants, every day, in this heat!), but they tell me their garden center customers should have plenty of pansies, violas, kale, lettuces, and other cool-weather annuals, and seeds for more, this month and next. And hopefully replacement shrubs and trees and groundcovers by winter.
Dinosaurs didn’t have the options we do today. I won’t moan over what has happened; I will move forward, appreciating those plants that make it, remembering fondly those that don’t, and thinking twice before replacing whatever fared the worst, in case this year’s weather isn’t the last of its ilk.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
