Your Secret Garden

Planting for Privacy

By Amy McDowell

The garden is a place to get away from the world—to escape from everyone and everything. Shed that cloak of stress and step into nature’s embrace. Your deck or patio can be an intimate, private retreat. It doesn’t matter if your neighbors are delightful—you can engage them in conversation if you choose—but you must create a space in your garden that is isolated from the outside world.

Privacy fences are tremendously popular because they create a visual barrier that takes little space and little care. There are many wonderful plants you may use to create a softer barrier. Here are a few shrubs to help create privacy in your garden. They are just about as easy to install and maintain as a fence.

Emerald arborvitae (Thuja occidentalis ‘Emerald’) is a narrow, upright evergreen commonly used for screening. It creates an attractive deep green backdrop for other plantings—flowering perennials look stunning in front of arborvitae. Emerald arborvitae grows slowly, reaching twelve feet tall and four feet wide at maturity. Pruning is not necessary to keep them looking sharp. Some arborvitaes suffer winter burn that creates brown patches, but emerald arborvitae is hardy and durable.

Lilacs (Syringa vulgaris) form a terrific hedge as long as you have the space for them. The deliciously fragrant blooms will fill your garden in May. You can find lilacs that bloom in every shade of purple, pink, and lavender, and even white or pale yellow. The common lilac grows fifteen feet tall and about eight feet wide. The best way to prune a lilac is to cut out no more than one third of the oldest, woodiest branches close to the ground. This will encourage new suckers to sprout at the base, keeping the overall size reduced and the blooms within range of your nose, rather than above your head.

Viburnums come in many shapes and sizes. Arrowwood viburnum (Viburnum dentatum) is named for its arrow-straight upright branches, and Koreanspice viburnum (V. carlesii) is named for its fragrant blooms. Arrowwood viburnum will grow to eight feet tall and six feet wide, and Koreanspice viburnum will mature to about five feet high and wide. Viburnums have rich dark green foliage and are extremely hardy here in central Iowa. In addition to these two, there are many other excellent varieties to choose from; each with its own wonderful characteristics.

Your list of plant choices is blessedly long and diverse. If your deck is elevated, your site may call for a small tree or a cluster of them. Imagine your deck or patio embraced in privacy. Picture a lush green barrier in your mind. Your new plantings may not give you the instant privacy of a fence, but it won’t take long. Take a deep breath. Soon you will have that delightful, secluded pocket of heaven in your garden.

How NOT to trim a tree

Tree Topping is a Tragedy

By Amy McDowell

“Forfeit his hand, he who beheads a tree.” John Evelyn, Sylva, published in 1664.

Those words were written 347 years ago, but incompetent morons are still topping trees today. My heart lurches with horror when I see a tree butchered like the one in this photo.

(Photo by Larry Costello)

Trees do need pruning from time to time, but they NEVER need a severe heading back or topping. In fact, a tree will never fully recover from being topped. It will scramble to replace all of that food-producing leaf surface, but the rapid new growth is always weaker.

“Don’t do big, drastic pruning once every 15 years,” says Dr. John Ball, a professor of forestry at South Dakota State University. “Tree care should be life-long and low-intensity.”

At a recent arborist conference, Ball shared his advice on tree care. Training young trees is ideal, because you can set them up to live a long and healthy life. Most often, however, people wait until the trees are mature and then prune them. “You cannot make a tree healthy by making it smaller,” writes Dr. Alex Shigo. And over thinning the canopy, says Ball, is like bleeding a tree to death. “Branches are independent, not parasitic. Each one must produce its own food.”

ISA Certified Arborists can look at a tree and recognize what to prune. You can trust that an ISA Certified Arborist will do what is best for the tree. They sometimes laugh that their clients expect to see a huge pile of tree trimmings when they are done working. A trustworthy arborist is one who is most concerned with the safety and health of the tree and not concerned about creating a large pile of brush to impress their clients.

There are more than two dozen ISA Certified Arborists in and around the Des Moines area. You can find arborists in your area by visiting www.TreesAreGood.com.

I’d like to thank Dr. John Ball of South Dakota State University for the inspiration for this column. The photo, taken by Larry Costello, was provided by the International Society of Arboriculture.

Perfection is an Illusion

No such thing as perfection in the garden

By Amy McDowell

Catalogs packed with photos of dreamy plants and immaculate gardens arrive in the mailbox every day, reminding me of the first time I ever ordered plants by mail. The photos, of course, were so beautiful I had trouble choosing what to order—I wanted it all. But when the plants arrived they were nothing like the lush and colorful catalog images I had daydreamed over for hours. I unwrapped clumps of roots packed in stringy peat and wet shredded newspaper and it was two years before the little plants began to resemble the catalog photos.

The flawless images in garden catalogs and magazines are just as misleading as the flawless models in fashion magazines. That kind of perfection is unachievable in the garden—at least if that’s what you expect every day of the season. The garden is ever changing: sometimes immature, sometimes overgrown and sometimes just a little rough around the edges. The moments of sheer garden glory are nestled somewhere in between.

Gardens, by their very nature, are supposed to be a little messy. We all know that the healthiest soils are those with bits of decaying plant matter strewn about. Outdoor fabrics do fade and fray, and the flat-tine pitchfork always ends up with one finger out of alignment. And even if the garden appears like a perfect Eden to visitors, the gardener can always name at least a half dozen flaws they plan to work on.

My garden is comfortable. I’ve spread shredded leaves over the beds again this fall and when I walked by one of the beds on a recent chilly evening, I noticed a leaf had tumbled from the bed onto the grass. I smiled and felt goofy about it. The disarray of decaying fall leaves sent a shiver of pride down my spine. My garden will never be perfect, but I love it for all its flaws. The joy is in the evolution of it and the insight that I glean from growing right along with it.

Amy McDowell is an Iowa Certified Nursery Professional. She has a degree in horticulture and has worked in the field for ten years. She lives and gardens in Polk County.

Where are the labels?

Show or no – your garden’s purpose

By Amy McDowell

I stepped forward to the railing and the garden that unfolded below me was one I had seen in a calendar photo some fifteen years earlier—the image so beautiful that I’d saved it and pinned it on my office wall for better than a decade. Vast fluid strokes of color washed through the valley below. It was the famous Sunken Garden at Butchart Gardens in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and it took my breath away.

Wordlessly, I ascended into the garden like wandering through a dream world. The grating voice of some crotchety tourist behind me broke into my mind. “Where are the labels?” she complained loudly. “None of the plants have any labels on them!” In the wonder of it all, I couldn’t have cared less about plant labels. They were ordinary plants, after all; common, everyday annuals planted in spectacular sweeps of color.

Rounding a bend in the path, we came across a gardener planting mums. The grump pounced on him about plant labels. With a loose swing of his arms, the gardener flung his hands out, palms up, and said, “This is a show garden, not a botanical garden!”

That simple statement made clear the garden’s mission. No apologies, no question about it—Butchart and the gardeners on staff there know exactly what they want to create. And I have no doubt that their clear vision is how they do it so successfully.

So what about your garden? Do you have a clear idea of what you are trying to create? Of course, there is much to be said for tottering in the garden somewhat aimlessly, whiling away the time and loving every moment of it. But a mission statement for your garden is the one way to assure that you eventually achieve what you set out to do. Without one, you never actually “set out to do” anything.

Every garden has some purpose; it may be something simple like dressing up the home, producing edibles or for personal enjoyment, solace or healing. The mission may change over the years as your family grows or your lifestyle changes. With a mission statement, you won’t waste time, energy, money or even thought on plant labels when your garden’s purpose is for show.

Amy McDowell is an Iowa Certified Nursery Professional. She has a degree in horticulture and has worked in the field for ten years. She lives and gardens in Polk County.