When I was in horticulture school, the old-skool dudes teaching pest control were all about the chemicals – they just didn’t believe organics could be as effective as the lethal stuff. Yet every so often, a hint of doubt would creep into their voices about safety.

I’d hear, “well, this one’s actually pretty bad” or  “ya don’t wanna get too close to this” and “this one’s chemically similar to Agent Orange and I’m not really sure why it’s still legal”. What?!!

“Agent Orange on your lawn” has never been the special Genevieve mojo I wanted to share with my gardening clients!

All right, geek talk ahead:

Weed N Feed and Weed B Gon contain 2, 4-D, which has some of the same toxic components as Agent Orange (read this Wikipedia article under the “manufacture” section for more info).

You may think of Roundup as being safer because studies have shown that it breaks down quickly in soil, and the company has claimed that Roundup is “practically non-toxic” to mammals, birds, and fish. However, recent evidence has shown that these old studies were deliberately falsified, resulting in 20 felony charges, fines, and jail time for those involved.

Recent studies not involving jail time show that Roundup is an endocrine disruptor, which means it messes with our reproductive systems and hormones. It also causes DNA damage and chromosomal aberrations. I don’t pretend to know what that translates into (cancer? thyroid issues? loud snoring?), but I know enough to not want that happening in my body.

(non-geeks, you’re safe to read again):

So recently I found a type of organic herbicide called Weed Pharm that is actually food-grade.  Seriously! Lest you think, like my old hort. instructors, that food-grade means “doesn’t work”, I tried this stuff out in my own garden to see. You’re supposed to wait for outdoor temps to reach 60 degrees or hotter for it to work, but I didn’t – I just waited for a dry day and coated my weeds in it.

Three days later the weeds were toast! Light brown, shriveled, and dead. It’s been two weeks and they have almost completely disintegrated. I had one dandelion return out of all that I sprayed, which is really good – that’s comparable in effectiveness to Roundup.

Like Roundup, it will kill any foliage it touches, so you can’t just spray it willy-nilly on your lawn. But you can kill dandelions in your lawn using Weed Pharm, via injection.

So, the good:

You can spray in vegetable gardens and places where you grow edibles, as well as garden beds around tree roots and in sidewalk cracks – just put a piece of cardboard between the spray “drift” and the foliage of any plants you would like to keep, and you’re safe. The residue’s gone in a day.

It works fast.

No chromosomal aberrations! Yay!

The bad:

It’s more expensive than the icky stuff and there’s no cheaper concentrated version available yet.

It burns the tops of weeds off, so if you have ancient established weeds that have set up residence in an area, you’ll need to spray a second time to kill them completely. If you keep up with your garden weeds somewhat often though, it seems to take care of them in the first try.

The odd:

It’s made of vinegar. Like, super-concentrated not-your-mama’s-salad-dressing vinegar. So your garden will smell of salad dressing. The gloves you wear when spraying will smell of salad dressing. And every time you walk by your garden storage shed you’ll wonder why you have an inexplicable craving for greens. (it beats the hell out of smelling endocrine-disruptor fumes though, doesn’t it?)

A discount for you:

Now we get to the good part where you save a load of cash and retire early to the Bahamas, right?

Here’s the deal: Weed Pharm rocks. I’m stoked to carry it in my gardening store, and to celebrate, those nice folks at OpenSky who host my shop agreed to give you guys a discount if you want to try it out, too.

Click here and use the code “WEED30” at checkout to get 30% off your purchase of Weed Pharm.

The code’s only good through next Thursday March 11th though, so if you want to get some Weed Pharm for yourself, hop on it ‘cause 30% off’s nothing to snortle at.

Want to learn more about organic weed control?

How to Kill Dandelions in Lawn Organically using Weed Pharm

How to Kill Weeds Organically: Your Best Options

Wikipedia articles: Roundup, 2,4-D (Weed and Feed ingredient), Agent Orange

Thinking of selling your home, or having a party? While a garden makeover may seem like an overwhelming task, if you know where to focus your energy you can get great results without having to fix everything.

Use these four tips in the garden areas most likely to be seen first – near the front door, areas visible from windows or the patio where you might entertain, and next to pathways.

Focus on the edges

Most people don’t see the details of a garden; they notice the overall effect. If you have lawn creeping into your garden beds, or weeds growing along the edges of your garden beds, cleaning up your borders so that you have a clean, simple, flowing line is an easy action that can make a slightly unfinished or messy area of the garden look tidy and cared-for.

If an area has never had a defined border, try laying a flexible rope in a gently sweeping curve that encompasses all of your plants. Beware the common beginner’s desire to add more and more curves to your bed (creating the “drunken snake” effect!). When in doubt, use the fewest curves possible and go with the simplest border that looks appealing to you.

Then just remove the lawn or weeds until you have a crisp new line. I use the ax side of my Pulaski to cut a clean line into the lawn, then use the mattock side to peel away the sod or weeds.

In an existing bed, even if you won’t have time to make the entire bed weed-free and perfect, if you focus on making the edges look sharp, you will fool people’s eyes into perceiving the bed as tidier than it is.

Blur your eyes to get the overall effect

Taking the long view of your garden areas can help you focus on making the entire garden look good, and keep you from accidentally spending all your time making one small area perfect.

Try the old artist’s trick of standing far back from each area and letting your eyes blur a bit. See what areas jump out as feeling messy or needing attention – bare spots, areas with a lot of weeds, dead foliage, or overwhelming areas where the trees or shrubs have gotten overgrown.

If your mature shrubs have an undefined shape or just look kind of moundy and overwhelming, one quick pruning trick is called “skirting”. You go around the plant and prune off any branches or stems within 6 inches of the ground. This lifts up the canopy, gives the shrubs some semblance of shape, and draws the eye upward and outward through the garden. Don’t do this on weeping plants of course!

Mulch, mulch, mulch

Nothing helps a garden look well-kept like a neatly applied layer of mulch/ wood chips. You can  use any kind of natural mulch that looks appealing to you. I use the smallest size fir bark, applied about 3” thick, but if you have a slope, shredded bark sticks better and won’t wash away. If you prefer, try a 2” layer of high-quality compost. Don’t use potting soil, since it usually contains bright white perlite!

Before you apply, smooth out the lumps and bumps in your soil. Put the mulch out in an even layer and rake it out. Pay special attention to making sure you bring the mulch neatly to the edges of the bed.

If you can’t mulch the entire bed, get good coverage on the edges and the first few feet of the bed, then sprinkle the mulch in a thinner layer as you move towards the back of the bed. If there’s no distinct line where the mulch stops, most people won’t notice that the whole garden isn’t mulched.

For bold bursts of color, use container plantings

It can seem like a good idea to pick up some annuals or other flowers to fill in your beds, but  often when you bring them home, they are too small to make a fast impact on the look of your garden. One way you can get that instant appeal is to use container plantings.

Go for the largest containers you own or wish to buy, and only select a few, especially if you are selling your home. Too many pots, no matter how attractively planted, look cluttered and busy.

Place them at strategic locations – near the front door, on the patio next to a boring area of garden bed, or even in a bed, if you can nestle it around some foliage so it looks like it fits in.

Then choose a tall centerpiece for each pot, a few trailing plants, and enough annuals to make the pot look instantly full. Try to stick with the same few themes – each pot should have some of the same plants as another pot in the area. Repeating themes isn’t boring, it’s soothing!

Alternately, you could choose one large, bold plant per pot and skip the froofy annuals. Go for things with architectural interest (showpiece plants with big, spiky, or interestingly textured leaves) or bold foliage color, and don’t be afraid to be a bit wild – that’s what containers are for.

Further reading:

Video Illustration of the “Skirting” Pruning Technique

How to Apply Mulch and What Kind to Use

Container Planting Ideas from Life on the Balcony

If you’ve hung around North Coast Gardening for any length of time, you know that I’m a sucker for tools that do multiple jobs well.

This hedging shear is my go-to tool for cutting back perennials in fall and winter, pruning ornamental grasses and sword ferns in winter, and deadheading heathers and other plants that respond well to shearing. Yeah, you can also use it for hedging your boxwood into the shape of a rooster, if you wish. You gotta have a little fun in life, right?

You can see how it works in this video:

The best thing about the Fiskars Powergear Hedger is the metal used and the coating on the metal, both of which help the shears cut cleanly and stay sharp, and the gears that allow it to cut through much thicker stems than most pruning shears do (if you’ve tried using regular hedging shears to cut back perennials, you know it isn’t all that effective – the gear on this one makes all the difference!).

Resources:

Buy the Fiskars Hedging Shear at my OpenSky Shop

Buy the Fiskars Hedging Shear at Amazon.com

Douglas Tallamy, author of Bringing Nature Home, wants to change the way we landscape- radically. He’s a native plant buff and makes a scientific case for planting more natives in our gardens to preserve biodiversity.

This five-part podcast (it’s only about 45 minutes long all put together) presented some game-changing info that’s making me really re-think how I garden.

Some highlights:

Bugs are good. They pollinate, birds eat them, and much as some folks don’t like them, it’s not overstating things to say us humans would be in serious danger without them.

Bugs are also very picky. They can sense the chemical composition of plants with their legs, and when it comes time to reproduce, many bugs will simply die if they can’t find a plant with the exact chemical signature they are looking for.

If a bug wants to lay eggs on a milkweed and there are only roses around, many bugs will die without laying those eggs. They’ve evolved over a long period of time to have relationships with specific plants, and without those plants, the bugs don’t reproduce. No bugs – no pollination, no birds, no tasty peaches for us to eat.

This whole bit about the chemical signature was kind of game-changing for me. I thought the arguments for biodiversity were about preserving native plants, which I have sympathy for but seems less connected to what I plant in landscapes, since I’m not planting endangered wildflowers anyway, I’m planting shrubs for the most part.

Hearing that it’s about making sure bugs reproduce, so they can take their rightful place in the food chain and the ecosystem, made it a lot easier to understand what a difference it can make to plant even a few native plants in a garden otherwise barren of them.

The problem is that there’s a lack of information on which plants have the biggest impact, how native is native, and can cultivated varieties of natives (like the white variety of our native flowering currant) still have the same good effect on nature? We simply need more scientific data on it as a lot of the info out there is emotion- and speculation-based.

Tallamy’s book is important for the concepts and explanations, but his specific plant advice is based on east coast natives, I hear. I’m hoping to find a guide to help us out here on the west coast…

Anyway, I LOVE plants and I am such a ridiculous plant geek that I can’t imagine ever throwing my beloved non-native plants under the bus. But if by incorporating a few beautiful natives into appropriate spots in the garden, I can have a big impact on our ecosystem and food chain – well, it doesn’t seem like too much of a sacrifice. I mean, have you seen our California and Pacific Northwest natives? Some of them are hot!

I’m going to be reading more about this to try and pinpoint which plants in our areas have the biggest impact, and then figure out how to effectively landscape with natives in a way that’s gorgeous and still fits with our expectations of what a pretty garden looks like.

Do you have any tips for native plant learning, beyond Doug Tallamy’s book? Leave your book rec’s and website info in the comments below!

Further Reading/ Listening:

Timber Press’s Doug Tallamy Podcasts

New York Times Interview with Tallamy

Buy the book: Bringing Nature Home: How You Can Sustain Wildlife with Native Plants, Updated and Expanded

Scott Hokunson’s Blue Heron Landscapes Blog: Review of Tallamy’s Book

Town Mouse and Country Mouse’s California Native Gardening Blog

I just got a nifty tip on how to kill dandelions organically when they are growing in your lawn or in the center of another plant: injection with vinegar-based organic weed killer.

You may have found that if you spray non-selective herbicide, organic or otherwise, on your dandelion that you end up with a dead patch of lawn to match your dead dandelion, which is so not cool. You can try getting the long taproot out manually with your soil knife, but it often takes a few tries because if you leave any portion of that taproot, you’re in for another dandelion soon.

It’s even harder to get rid of dandelions in the center of perennials or small shrubs, because you don’t want to injure your good plant with vigorous digging at the taproot, and you certainly can’t spray.

So when Susan Lewis, maker of Weed Pharm, a food-grade organic herbicide made from concentrated vinegar (20% acetic acid), gave me this tip, I was thrilled!

Here’s what you do:

• Get a small syringe without a needle (the ones used to give cats medicine by mouth, about 40 cc’s, work great)
• Put 3/4 of an ounce of Weed Pharm in the syringe
• Inject your dandelion deep in to the head (or growth node) with the Weed Pharm, aiming for the central spot where all the leaves spring from, or alternately lift the foliage and come in at the top of the taproot from the side
• Wait patiently for two weeks, during which time your dandelion will look perfectly happy
• After a couple weeks, you can lift the top of the dandelion right off of the poor, pickled taproot

The whole injection-by-hand thing may sound like a pain, but if your dandelions have really good taproots and keep coming back, I’d think 20 seconds per weed is well worth it being gone forever.

Susan’s working with some folks to develop an injection system that can be used standing up, which is great news for pros or those who just have a lot of stinkin’ dandelions.

Another cool thing to note is that while spraying herbicide (any kind) is only effective on dry days with temperatures above 60 degrees Fahrenheit, injection of herbicide can be done in the dead of winter with the rain pouring down.

I haven’t yet tried this personally, but will be running my own tests to see how it works in the next few weeks.

For more info, check out:

Organic Weed Control: How to Kill Weeds Organically Without Harmful Chemicals

Buy Weed Pharm at my OpenSky Shop

Buy Weed Pharm at Amazon

Anne Asher, a movement specialist from The MOVE! Blog, answers questions about how professional or passionate gardeners can reduce the strain that comes from repetitive gardening tasks. Check out her new product – great for winter time – called Clear the Blear. Here’s this month’s installment:

When pruning apple and other trees in January, I often tire my shoulders using the pole pruners or sawing/ pruning above my head. Have you got any tips for easing shoulder pain while pruning trees?

Hi Gen,

The first thing that comes to mind is that you probably are not “in tune” with your shoulder blades, those flat triangular shaped bones located on your upper back.  Those bones are there for a reason.  When you don’t involve them in the work you do, your arms must provide all the power for the pruning.  This takes a LOT of muscle, and after a while they get so tired and sore they go on strike!  And you can feel that.

As you become aware of the natural ability of the shoulder blades to support the upper back, you will probably be able keep the tension out of the tops of the shoulders while you work. Try taking one hand and wrapping it around your ribs until you can touch the shoulder blade in the back.  Got that?  Now lift the arm (the one that’s attached to the shoulder blade you are touching) and move it in various directions.  Once you can sense the ability of the shoulder blade to move, then try moving just the shoulder blade.  Try squeezing it toward your spine.  Feel the shoulder blade as is slides across the ribcage.  Congratulations!  You’ve isolated the action of the shoulder blade.

Next, try inhaling and moving them up to your ears and hold them there.  Exhale and drop them.  Try again – inhale, bring them up and squeeze.  Exhale and release.

The idea here is that you want to not only be aware of the shoulder blades, but also strengthen the muscles that move them.  These simple exercises are great for that, but you can also work with free weights and gym machines.  The yoga down dog, done correctly will help you with shoulder flexibility and strength, so that’s another good one.  Another thing you could do to condition this area are wall push ups.  Just stand a foot or two away from the wall.  Lean your whole body in when you do this exercise – be like a plank – don’t bend your spine or break at the hips.  The hands on the wall should be at about the nipple level.  Then push against the wall and come up.

All of these exercises get you prepared for taking the load in your shoulders, and not your arms. Also, it’s important to keep your “core” strong.  So doing things like Pilates and yoga will help you separate the use of your arms from the use of your shoulders, and the use of your shoulders from the use of your arms.  Once you can do that, you have choices as to how to go about pruning those trees!

***Do you have any areas that hurt you when you garden? Let us know in the comments, and Anne can answer your questions in future articles.***

Anne Asher has been in the bodywork and holistic health field for over 20 years.  She has worked in chiropractors’ offices, physical therapy clinics and in her own business.  She taught Pilates based exercise to people with chronic musculoskeletal pain for 5 years in Humboldt County.  Anne is now the Back and Neck Pain guide on About.com.  About.com is a New York Times web property.

If you like this post, you may also enjoy:

Your Gardening Body: Digging Without Strain or Pain

Your Gardening Body: Using Loppers Safely Without Strain or Pain

Your Gardening Body: How to Rake and Sweep Without Strain or Pain

Ready to prune your Miscanthus Grass? This is the time of year to do it! Ornamental grasses start shedding little grass bits everywhere in January, and with every windy storm they become increasingly messy until in early March you have a bunch of grass sticks still upright and grass leaves piled up everywhere in your garden BUT on your plant!

You also want to prune now because if you wait too long, the new growth will begin to emerge from the base and when you whack the old growth, you’ll also trim the new shoots, which is no good.

I’ve written before about how to prune ornamental grasses – which ones you ought to whack and how, and which you ought to leave be. The Miscanthus grasses are pretty much all in the “whack” category, except for M. transmorrisonensis, the Evergreen Miscanthus that still looks green and fresh in winter. You needn’t prune that one!

Here’s a quick tutorial on how I prune Miscanthus Grass in winter:

The “before” shot. It’s very pretty, but what you can’t see are all the grassy leaves that have piled up around the neighboring shrubs. Mes-sy!

First, I use some rope to tie up my Miscanthus Grass so the stems and leaves don’t fly every which way when I start to cut.

Once the grass is neatly tied together, I use my trusty Fiskars Hedging Shears (video review here) to cut the entire thing back to 6 to 10 inches tall.

The Fiskars Powergear Shears cut thicker stems than most handheld hedging shears do (most hedgers are just meant for delicate leafy growth like Boxwood), so they’re great for cutting things back at this time of year.

You could also use electric or gas hedgers, but doing it by hand is safer and takes me about 60 seconds per grass, so using the power hedgers isn’t a huge time-saver.

Once it’s cut, you can lift the entire bundle of grass and take it to your compost pile. Simple, no?

Related reading:

How to prune other types of ornamental grasses in winter.

If you’re tired of cutting your grasses back every year, here are my suggestions for some winter-interest grasses that don’t need pruning.

How to summer-prune your Miscanthus grass.

It’s bare-root season, guys, and the roses are cheap and plentiful! I’ve written before about how to select a bare-root rose and about some disease-resistant rose varieties for the coastal Pacific Northwest.

I wanted to follow up with some additional suggestions that our local rose expert, Cynthia Graebner of Fickle Hill Old Rose Nursery, left in the comments of one of those posts.

She suggested these varieties, many of which I had never heard of, as being both gorgeous and disease-resistant in our cool coastal climate:

Recommended Austin Roses (most Austins make good cut roses, she says!):

Leander

A Shropshire Lad

Golden Celebration

Brother Cadfael

Mary Rose

Abraham Darby

Othello

Pat Austin

Recommended hybrid musks:

Kathleen

Trier

Buff Beauty

Lavender Lassie

Cornelia

And some other assorted roses that do well without chemicals:

Ispahan

Dortmund

Mme Alfred Carriere

Lamarque

Reve d’Or

Narrow Water

As Cynthia so aptly said – “So many good ones….why why why plant chemical dependent sad roses??”

If you’re lucky enough to live locally to Cynthia Graebner (her nursery is in Arcata, CA), then you can get many of these varieties by giving her a call either now or later in the season to ask after potted roses (she doesn’t do bare-root), or catch her at the Arcata Farmer’s Market. She’s at (707) 826-0708.

Another astute commentor, Tom of Tall Clover Farm, left his suggestions for roses that do well for him without spraying in the Seattle area:

Madame Alfred Carriere — a noisette rose, pinkish white, climber,fragrant
Sombreuil – gorgeous white fragrant confection, frgrant
Don Juan — red climber, fragrant and reliable
Francois Juranville — big rambler, thornless, once blooming but gorgeous

I enjoy Sombreuil in a local client’s garden and it looks gorgeous without pesticides, and I’ve heard good things about Don Juan.

If you enjoy the beauty, fragrance and cut flowers of roses, but aren’t into the whole spraying scene (think of the honeybees!), then check out these varieties and choose a sturdy, healthy rose that will perform for you without nasty chemicals.

If you’re outside of Humboldt County or want a variety that Cynthia doesn’t carry, try ordering bare-root from Regan Nursery, which has an overwhelmingly great selection and gives honest information about the performance of each of the roses they stock.

—-Also, check out the lovely Rebecca Sweet’s latest post over at Gossip in the Garden on roses that do well in California without getting diseases. She also has a really cute video of her pruning roses. Go on over and tell her you like her hat!!—-

Articles mentioned:

How to select a bare-root rose

Disease-resistant roses for the coastal Pacific Northwest

Amy Stewart’s excellent article about her visit to Cynthia Graebner’s Fickle Hill Old Rose Nursery

And further reading for rose fans:

How to prune roses

Rose humor – the incomparable Dr Leda Horticulture from Regan Rose Nursery

Right now it’s major big time pruning season here in Northern Cali. I’m cutting back hardy perennials, roses, fruit and other dormant trees and ornamental grasses.

But there are a few things I’m leaving alone for the time being. A lot of my favorite plants are frost-tender and can be killed by a stern frost this time of year. For some of these plants, the old, dead foliage and stems are providing just an extra degree or two of protection for the tender new buds and shoots coming along for next year.

Dormant Mexican Bush Sage or Salvia leucantha

See the tender new shoots inside? The old stems help protect them from frost damage.

If you can hold off, don’t prune these frost-tender plants until after last frost, which here in Humboldt County is around mid-March:

Salvia leucantha or Mexican Bush Sage (and other tender sages)

Fuchsia thymifolia or Fairy Fuchsia

Lemons and other citrus

Brugmansia/ Datura or Angel’s Trumpet

Loropetalum chinense or Fringe Flower

Ginger

Tibouchina urvilleana or Princess Flower

Passiflora or Passionflower Vines

Pelargoniums or traditional Geraniums (Hardy Cranesbills/ true Geraniums are fine to cut back now)

Polystichum polyblepharum or Tassel Fern

Dicksonia antarctica or Tasmanian Tree Fern

Further reading:

Pam Penick from Digging has some tips on what to do with tender plants and particularly Agaves that have frozen and become mushy.

Rebecca Sweet from Gossip in the Garden has a great tutorial on protecting tender plants from the cold.

I’m honored and pleased to be able to share with you the writing of my favorite garden humorist, Dr Leda Horticulture.

Regan Nursery, the finest place to buy bare root roses online, and a gorgeous full-service garden center serving the San Francisco Bay Area, has given us permission to reprint Dr Leda’s articles from their rose nursery newsletter. If you have never read her writing, you are in for a treat!

Dr Leda Horticulture’s Ten Rosy Resolutions for the New Year

1. My internal clock tends to run fast (which explains why I’m writing New Year’s Resolutions in November). Every winter, I grow restless and try to jump-start spring. Inevitably, I develop a violent and irresistible urge to prune roses on New Year’s Day, but the recommended date here in Louisiana isn’t until mid-February (and the recommended pruning date wherever you live is whenever your forsythia comes into bloom). Last year I jumped the gun, and a disastrous late freeze turned all my tender new growth into slimy black mush. The protective foliar cuticles ruptured, leaving even resistant roses vulnerable to disease. This year I will be patient and NOT prune too early. Better a tardy spring flush than sick whiny roses.

2. One day towards the end of pruning season last year, I was browsing in a book store when I noticed a stranger staring at me intently. He was holding a book titled Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain. The skin on my arms was crisscrossed with the jagged scratches and slashes that only a vicious ‘Mermaid’ can deliver. “Oh, ha-ha!” I said cheerily. “It’s not what you think.” The man just shook his head morbidly and turned away. This year I am actually going to wear my gloves when I prune. Sturdy opera length gloves, with thick leather palms and canvas gauntlets. Maybe even a welding mask.

3. When I teach pruning classes, I always tell my students that the First Commandment of Rose Pruning is, “Thou shalt not prune wearing an expensive hand-knit sweater.” And yet my neighbors recently received an entertaining real- life demonstration  of the consequences of ignoring this mandate, as the prunee du jour snagged my favorite Aran Islands souvenir and unraveled it dramatically before their horrified eyes. This year I will finally take my own advice and wear a heavy denim jacket.

4. Any rose that fails to make my heart tap dance like Fred Astair must go, to make room for roses that do. Those jolly green giants that grow huge but rarely bloom: must go. The leprous dogs that drop leaves like confetti: must go. The maladroit losers that bore me to  tears, or clash with companions, or blow their petals in five minutes: all must go. Call me Madame Defarge, but this year I will don my black hood and shovel- prune without mercy. (“Many of you feel bad for this ugly rose. That is because you are crazy. It has no feelings.”)

5. There’s an old dictum that the harder a hole is to dig, the deeper you ought to dig it. Those of us with bad backs and heavy clay soil have come to loathe this dictum.  As a decrepit old pro, I sometimes feel entitled to take shortcuts—like “snapping” the spent flowers with my bare hands when I deadhead, instead of meticulously cutting each stem at a perfect 45 degree angle above the next node with five leaflets. I’ve even been known to prune with a chainsaw. But no more shortcuts when it comes to holes! This year I am going to dig my planting holes 2 feet wide and 2 feet deep. Henceforth, decadent pampered roots will luxuriate in a lavish underground Club Med of impeccable drainage and organic abundance.

6. All my life, I’ve had the typical nurseryman’s garden: one of everything, and the more bizarre the merrier. This makes for a fun playground, but my eyeballs have grown weary of the crazy-quilt commotion. I yearn for restful expanses of color, laid out in bold sweeping swaths. This year I’m going to plant my roses in groups of three. Repetition, rhythm, and continuity are the new buzz words down at Cafe Chez Dr. Leda.

7. “Wouldn’t a brilliant blue Morning Glory look stunning on the fence beside my climbing pink ‘Dream Weaver’,” I once remarked with alarming naivete. Two months later I couldn’t locate the house, much less the fence or the rose or the patio furniture or the dog. The rapacious creeper had devoured everything, like a blanket of thick green snow. Twenty years from now I’ll still be fending off volunteer Morning Glories. This year I will refrain from planting lovely but invasive and self-sowing vines within 50 miles of my roses.

8. I have an embarrassing confession: I don’t own a single orange rose. This year I’m going to expand my color horizons. I’m going to redo the entire south side of my driveway, creatively and adventurously working in warm peachy oranges,  sophisticated smoky oranges,  pastel sherbet  oranges, festive coral oranges, and tropical sunset oranges. Maybe I’ll even include a flaming hot tangerine orange. Er, better make that three.

9. It’s probably due to egotistical vanity rather than selfless generosity that I’ve been inclined to  leave the roses out in the yard, where they can be admired by a vast array of total strangers, rather than bring them into the house for the enjoyment of a drastically smaller number of dearly beloveds. This year, I’m going to cut more roses for the house and to give away to friends. The strangers on the sidewalk will have to be content with admiring foliage, while a certain rather attractive gentleman of my acquaintance will be obliged to look up from his morning paper at regular intervals to exclaim over the contents of a vase.

10. In his 80s, Sir Winston Churchill delivered a commencement address at Harrow, the boarding school he attended as a boy. Legend has it he stood up at the podium, glared over his glasses, and gave the pithiest of speeches: “Never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever, give up. Never give up. Never give up. Never give up!” he roared. Then he sat down to thunderous applause.

The story may be apocryphal, but the message is timely. From now on, I will not be plunged into deep dark paralyzing despair by unexpected freezes, lengthy droughts, infernal summer heat, plagues of blackspot and thrips, hurricanes, tornadoes, Biblical deluges, or any other fast balls Mother Nature decides to pitch my way. This year, I’m just going to roll with the punches and enjoy the heck out of my roses. I hope you all do the same.

Special thanks to Regan Nursery for allowing us to reprint Dr Leda’s wonderful garden writing. Regan Nursery is definitely the place to go if you are looking for quality bare root roses. They carry over 1000 varieties of grade #1 roses each year (grade #1 roses have at least three strong canes of 5/16” diameter, and they produce healthy, strong, productive shoots), which you can have shipped to your home. They are my recommended supplier and I already have a shopping list started for next year’s bare root ordering season!

Be sure to stop by their nursery in person if you’ll be visiting the San Francisco Bay Area – they have a great selection of Camellias, Hydrangeas, Japanese Maples, as well as their legendary selection of roses and a full array of nursery plants.

If you enjoyed this post, check out these other excellent Dr Leda articles.