Column: "GETTING THE LAY OF THE LAND"
Previously published in Gothic
Beauty #28
Just for a second, think about the two words “gothic gardening.” Just for a second. Did you get images of an overgrown cemetery or abandoned park, festooned with creepers and dead branches? Do you have images of an herb garden where everything therein is medicinal or poisonous? How about antique Wardian cases full of ferns, club mosses, and other antediluvian remnants of past life? A pond overrun with water lilies amidst a half-sunken fountain? Statuary and gravestones? Topiaries? A greenhouse full of orchids and Borneo pitcher plants? Roses? Lilies? Angel trumpets and moonflowers? Nightshade and privet, or Venus flytraps and butterworts? Stark white marble ground cover to reflect the full moon, or narrow pathways between pumpkin patches and rosemary bushes?
Yes, you can see the problem. No matter how inclusive one
wants to get, any definition of what constitutes gothic gardening
depends upon individual tastes, attitudes, climate and soil
restrictions, and available free time. Someone with
independent wealth and time could reconstruct a scale Neolithic
monolith site and festoon the area with raspberry bushes, but
it’s no more or no less valid than the apartment dweller with
a Vanda
orchid that encircles a compact fluorescent fixture. Just as
how gothic fashion has plenty of room for variation and
experimentation, gothic gardening offers plenty of opportunities to
explore the darker side of horticulture.
Since we could argue all day about the particulars of gothic gardening,
let’s start with a basic assumptive definition. For
our purposes, gothic gardening is any gardening style that emphasizes
entropy, or at least more chaos than what’s normally found in
a controlled garden area. Japanese gardens tend to emphasize
the natural while subtly emphasizing the harmony of the
scene: gothic gardening should emphasize the slightly
unnatural, distorted, or disturbing. Good gothic gardens are
beautiful, yes, but they should also be subtly uncomfortable.
One of the great ironies of gothic gardening is that it requires the
heliophobic to acknowledge the sun. Without access to
lanterns, there will be times where peeking out at the yellow hurty
thing in the sky is unavoidable. Speaking as someone who does
a very good impersonation of Bill Paxton from the film Near Dark when
exposed to direct sunlight, I suggest three options for the seriously
sun-sensitive: raise shade-loving plants underneath mature
trees or along high walls, plant to do all of your work at dusk and
dawn, or work indoors. Greenhouses are perfect for this, as
both glass and most plastic greenhouse glazings absorb ultraviolet
light, thereby protecting the contents of the greenhouse from the worst
of the sun’s wrath. Likewise, many fascinating
plants can be raised in sunny windowsills and removed at night in order
to appreciate them, and many orchid and fern enthusiasts bring plants
out for display in common areas well away from windows, returning them
to the window before they wilt or fade and replacing them with fresh
plants. If worse comes to worst, while the term
“terrarium” invokes cheesy grade-school
accumulations of plants in old mayonaisse jars, the art is staging a
comeback thanks to improvements in enclosures, lighting, and varieties
of plant available.
The first question that should always be asked when embarking on any
gardening project, even more than “Do I have the time to do
this right?”, is “What do I want to
accomplish?” That may be a stumper for a while, but
take your time. Think about it for a while. Look at
your available area, and feel free to abandon the usual Better Homes
& Gardens gibberish. Some of the best gardens
I’ve ever seen used back spaces behind former industrial
sites to produce an impressive combination of post-apocalyptic and lost
civilization motifs. Don’t worry about having to
spend a lot to get your dream garden, either: some of those
after-The-Bomb gardens cost less than $50 to pull off.
When considering what you want to accomplish, let’s start
with a few possibilities:
- Utility: Is this a garden purely for your pleasure, or is it going to have to earn its living? Are you wanting a cooking and medicinal herb garden? How about garden for producing floral extracts, such as roses or lavender? Do you live in a locale where you can grow exotic fruits and vegetables outdoors, or will these need to stay indoors for most of the year? Do you want plants that provide habitat and feeding areas for your favorite animals (owls, lizards, opossums), or do you want vines and spines to keep everybody out?
- Variety: Do particular plants draw you more than others? Are antique and graveyard roses a particular passion, or are orchids more your speed? Do you want a bog garden full of carnivorous plants and bog orchids, or do you want a craggy rock garden? Which works better for you: bamboo, cactus, or moss?
- Features: Does your area have a particular aspect, such as a pond or a perpetually shady space, that automatically draws the eye? A fence that needs covering, or a window that needs enhancement? Is the area so overgrown and rugged that it may require everything to be razed and replanted, or is it so bare that anything would be an improvement? Do you already have stone, statuary, or water features that only need accents, or will you have to bring them in from elsewhere? Do you really want a Japanese garden, or do you only want to steal some of the techniques and take them somewhere new?
- Seasonality: Let’s face it. What looks spectacular in the middle of summer is going to look threadbare or neglected in winter, and vice versa. Do you want a garden that only reaches its peak for two or three months, or one that continues to show new aspects of its personality all year round?
- Time: Most gardening guides presume that we gardeners have nothing but free time to keep working on improving our sites. Realistically, though, most of us have real jobs (and those who don’t can stop flaunting it, thank you very much), so the only time available for improvements are weekends and the occasional holiday off from work. Do you want flora that look impressive but require a lot of babying, especially if it’s not quite appropriate for the area? Or do you want nearly indestructible plants that only need to be planted and established and they do the rest of the work for themselves?
Think about these for a little while, and consider the below
references for guidelines. The important thing to remember is
that gardening is supposed to be enjoyable: if you
aren’t getting pleasure from the experience, you probably
need to go in a new direction.
Plantwatching:
How Plants Live Feel and Work by Malcolm Wilkins
(McMillan, 1988, ISBN 0-333-44503-1). More of a general guide
to the plant kingdom than anything else, Plantwatching goes
into the details of plant physiology and what distinguishes different
orders of plant from each other. It’s much more
readable than a standard botany textbook, and it goes into quite a bit
of detail on oddball varieties neglected in a world of carnations and
hostas.
You Grow Girl by
Gayla Trail (Fireside, 2005, ISBN 0-7432-7014-2). An
extension of the famed www.yougrowgirl.com site, this is pretty much
THE guide for urban gardening of all sorts, and it gives tips on
everything from tips on propagating seed to making your own garden
gear. The highest compliment I can pay to this book is that I
snag every copy I can find from used bookstores and give them to
friends for birthday gifts. Anyone at a loss with what to do
with their back yard or apartment balcony needs a copy on the
bookshelf.
Gardens of
Obsession: Eccentric and Extravagant Visions by
Gordon Taylor and Guy Cooper (Seven Dials, Cassell &
Co., 2000, ISBN 1841880930). Making basic decisions about
what to do with your garden depend sometimes on seeing what others have
done with theirs, and Gardens
of Obsession catalogues particularly bizarre or
fascinating gardens around the world. Any book that
catalogues Portmeirion in Wales (the shooting location for the
Sixties-era television series The
Prisoner) and notes its horticultural wealth is
particularly deserving of attention.
Gardens of New
Orleans: Exquisite Excess by Lake Douglas and
Jeannette Hardy (Chronicle Books, 2001, ISBN 0-8118-2421-7).
Sometimes it’s easy to become overwhelmed with all of the
garden accoutrements and styles, and a new perspective is
needed. This book is heartbreaking when you realize that
almost all of the gardens described therein were destroyed by Hurricane
Katrina, but it’s also affirming in that most of these were
done with little or no money in the first place, and that the people of
New Orleans are building new gardens to replace what had been lost in
the hurricane. The next time you tell yourself “I
can’t afford to do this,” tale a look at the
gardens of the Ninth Ward and understand that it’s the drive,
not the money, that makes a memorable garden.
“Sidenote: The Starter”
It’s the universal question faced by
anyone wanting to start gardening. “But
what should I get that I won’t kill?”
That’s one of the best questions you can ask, and
it’s one of the hardest to answer.
One of the reasons why it’s so hard to answer is that short
of sending someone to your house or garden and evaluating soil
conditions, light, temperature, and the likelihood that
you’ll have the time to keep up with your new charges,
there’s no telling for sure. Those with more
knowledge may give recommendations based on their own experiences, but
advice on plants that do their best in Miami is almost worthless to
Seattle gardeners.
This gets particularly touchy when it comes to intrusive species, which
are plants and animals that grow out of control when introduced to new
areas where they face no competition. The more famous
intrusive include the mongoose and coqui frog in Hawaii and the cane
toad in Queensland, but plant intrusive can be even more damaging or
dangerous. For instance, Bermudagrass is one of the only
varieties of lawn grass that can survive a typical Dallas summer, but
it’s such a tenacious intrusive that deliberately bringing it
elsewhere outside of its range is justification for fines,
imprisonment, and the occasional savage beating by Customs and
agriculture officials. Before bringing in something new,
check with your local agricultural division or ministry and ask if the
plant you just fell in love with is the local Public Enemy Number
One. They’ll thank you later.
That said, picking a good starter plant for someone unsure about
gardening ability spreads throughout the plant kingdom, and discussing
the perfect starter plant among serious horticulture enthusiasts is a
great way to turn a party into a recreation of the end of an Akira
Kurosawa and/or George Romero film. However, I can make one
really good suggestion as a place to start, because it’s
where I started.
The genus Kalanchoe
is a member of the crassula family, which includes the suitably alien
jade plant Crassula
ovata, and includes about 125 species in various stages of
cultivation. The kalanchoes have the advantage of being very
tough: besides being succulents, they thrive in poor soils
and with lots of benign neglect, and they’re extremely easy
to propagate. I currently have a community grown from a
single broken leaf I scavenged from an old office, and K. daigremoniana is
known as “Mother of Thousands” and
“Pregnant Plant” because it grows new shoots from
serrations in its leaves. Most only need watering once per
month and low levels of fertilizer, thrive under standard morning or
evening sun, grow in standard pots without issue, and produce
spectacular blooms. They also grow in any number of
disturbing forms, and many can be shaped, very gently, into bonsai,
Under the right conditions, the question won’t be
“Can I keep my plant alive?”, but instead
“Do I have any friends who want to take my surplus?”
WARNING:
many kalanchoes are toxic in leaves or stems, although some varieties
are used in their native habitats to treat medical maladies.
For this reason, research your species or variety for possible
poisoning issues with pets and children.
