Gardening

First of all I must express my deepest thanks to the dear one who made this possible. I was given the gift of a donation to start a pot garden on my deck and I am beyond delighted and so very grateful. My deepest most gracious thanks to you dear one, you know who you are.

I am going to plan this very carefully. After therapy I went to Lowes Garden Center just to look. I decided to buy three plants just to get things started, to bring some color and a sense of things beginning in earnest. Most of what I will be growing will be from seeds, some bulbs, little plants I can find inexpensively here and there, perhaps I will be fortunate enough to get some cuttings from friends with established gardens, there are so many possibilities and I am so excited. I am lit up like a Christmas tree!

I was in Lowes for some time just looking and looking at everything. I didn’t want to buy much to start and finally decided on these two pelargoniums and the gorgeous pot of ranunculus. I also bought a few bags of potting soil on sale. I have a handful of small pots here and will be on the lookout for inexpensive or even free pots. A hodgepodge will be fine. It will be fun to “grow” my garden, adding to it in bits and pieces, a pot here, a few seeds there. I saw some pots at Lowes that I liked but I didn’t want to spend too much too soon. I am portioning out my funds carefully.

I like a wild array of colorful flowers and herbs. I have never been a vegetable gardener, with a few rare exceptions, and because it’s just me pretty much anything I tried to grow, food-wise, would produce too much. But I can never have enough flowers. I have a pretty good idea what will fill the handful of small pots I have here, my beloved “Nasty Ladies.” (Nasturtiums) which I have usually planted in every color they come in. One of my favorite places to get seeds because they are very economical and have a wonderful selection is Pinetree Garden Seeds. I have purchased seeds from them for nearly 30 years. They are wonderful people to deal with too. They have a wonderful website and you can get their paper catalog too. I just ordered one. That’s something else I’m having fun doing, ordering paper copies of my favorite garden catalogs. I read garden catalogs like other people read novels! At least I used to. Now I want to again. Another catalog I think every serious gardener should have — they have a collection of seeds you won’t find anywhere else and the catalog itself is a serious education in gardening — is J.L. Hudson, Seedsman. When I started ordering from him almost 30 years ago they only had a paper catalog and I will order one of those, but they now have a wonderful website. It isn’t colorful and flashy, it’s for the serious gardener.

A challenge for me will be to learn how to plant small, meaning that in the past I have ordered bulbs in bulk, 500 daffodils at a time say, and now, with a limited budget and limited space, planting in pots on my deck, I will have to plant a few handfuls of bulbs. My garden here before the fire was very large and spread out. Also most of my beloved regularly planted flowers were tall cottage garden flowers, sunflowers of all types, old fashioned single hollyhocks, tons of cosmos, tall zinnias, all of these things I planted so much of, such lush gardens they were, that not to have the room for such things will mean making new choices, flowers that may have been lost in large planted areas I will now find precious and fall in love with in a new way. I am giving much thought to this.

I would love to hear from those of you who garden in pots in small areas. And what are your favorite garden resources, catalogs, websites, etc? I’d love to hear from you about that. Today I was thinking again about one of my all-time favorite garden books, and how I’d love to do something like this. The book was by one of my favorite garden writers, Elizabeth Lawrence. The book, Gardening For Love: The Market Bulletins. The Market Bulletins were an amazing resource for home gardeners where women shared seeds and cuttings, wrote letters, and became friends through a shared love of gardening. The bulletins were put out by the state departments of agriculture for farmers and many farm women sold seeds and plants through the bulletins to make a little pocket money. The writer Eudora Welty put Elizabeth Lawrence’s name on The Mississippi Market Bulletin list and a whole new world opened for Elizabeth. This is one of the most charming books I have ever read.

I used to have a very large library of garden books. Some of them survived the fire. I am going to begin reading them again, just for the love of them. Not how-to books but books that are real stories. One of my favorite garden books ever because it’s just so much fun is a book that I bought several copies of when it came out because I was so in love with it I kept giving it away to people who just HAD to have it. It is Passalong Plants by Steve Bender and Felder Rushing. It is an absolute hoot and is about the southern tradition of passing plants along, sharing cuttings and so on so that many plants still around today survived when they might not have otherwise and most of these plants are not plants you can find in most garden centers. You have to search for them. I had a great many of these plants in my garden. I’m not sure what I will be able to find now or plant in pots but I will read this book again and dream.

It is amazing what an act of kindness will do, and my friend’s gift to me to enable me to start this new little garden has awakened so much in me I am kind of in awe because I had thought my gardening self was lost forever. But I think real gardeners never lose the desire to grow beautiful things. This just may be a whole new return to life the likes of which I cannot yet even imagine.

For now I walk about onto my deck and look at my lovely pelargoniums and the delightful dancing ranunculus and I feel such joy, I am so deeply grateful. It is spring, and there will be a garden afterall, and if there is new life here, what else is possible? I think there is so much more than I ever dreamed could be. What a grand adventure it feels like before me, one pot, a handful of seeds, and a few bulbs at a time. I have begun.