New Year's resolutions for the garden are worth keeping

ANNABELLE HYDRANGEAS have basketball-sized flower heads held high above their leaves — until the first downpour anyway. Then the plant's too-skinny branches droop low, the shrub splays open, and the glorious, rain-soaked flowers drag in the mud. It's a sad sight, and I'm resolved that this year, finally, I will remember to circle the plant with wire fencing in April. If you get the cage on there early enough, the hydrangea's leaves grow to disguise the wire, and the plant holds its flowers upright all summer and autumn.

Really, this year I'm going to do it right.

We're lucky enough to pursue a passion that allows us the illusion, at least, of starting fresh each spring.

The new year is prime time for gardeners to look back in consideration and forward with anticipation. Summer isn't so remote that we aren't still haunted by our mistakes. We can take comfort in the fact that gardening is one long and engrossing experiment over which we have only so much control. So in that spirit, here's what I and some talented gardening friends are determined to do differently this year, in addition to caging that poor, droopy hydrangea:

Speaking of supporting plants, how about the peonies, delphinium and the lilies? I'm always tricked by how sturdy they look early in the season. Why do I continue to be surprised, every year, at how they topple in a wind or rainstorm? Once bent over, they never look naturally upright again. Stake early, stake well. That's my mantra for 2010.

And this year, surely, I'll install those copper strips around the ligularia and hosta before the slugs riddle the leaves with holes, instead of after.

In the vegetable patch I resolve to pick all my squash and beans before they grow huge seemingly overnight. I'll plant more lettuces and herbs and fewer bolting broccoli. No more fava beans, either. As delicious and pretty as they are, I balk at all the work to prepare them. You pick a heaping colander of pods and end up, hours later, with a quarter cup of beans — not a good trade-off in time or garden space.

Most difficult of all, I plan to leave more space in springtime for the garden to fill in without overcrowding. This year I'll learn to tolerate bare dirt in May for the payoff of an August garden that isn't bursting at the seams. Such restraint in the midst of spring gardening fever must surely be the litmus test of maturity. I hope I'm up to it.

And while I'm talking maturity, this is the year I'll be content with a single rose in my garden. It's 'Westerland,' after all, whose glossy leaves and ruffled, fragrant flowers are the essence of rose, chosen to fulfill, in a single specimen, all those lingering rose longings.

Garden writer Lorene Edwards Forkner has an unusual goal for her West Seattle garden. "My efforts will be focused (finally!) on the renovation of our vintage travel-trailer garden folly." She's talking about the humpbacked, aluminum "Lil Loafer" that holds pride-of-place in her back garden. She's planting an aluminum-colored garden around it, with silvery 'Ivory Prince' hellebore, astelia and Pittosporum tenufolium 'Variegatum' to reflect its gleam.

"Like a kid playing house or building a fort, this year I'm putting play back into the backyard," resolves Forkner.

Bainbridge Island artist-gardeners David Lewis and George Little have practical resolutions for the new year. "We're going to hire out all the heavy lifting; no boulders and no exceptions," says Little. "We're going to keep it simple. Less upkeep equals more time with friends," he concludes.

Ketzel Levine, formerly of NPR, gardens in Portland. She details, a little plaintively, a concise set of resolves we might all take to heart:

"I will stop putting off dividing the iris," she writes by e-mail. "I will stop putting off dividing the kniphofia. I will learn to set the drip-irrigation timer and stop calling friends to do it. I will rescue the tree peony from beneath the overgrown grevillea. I will give up plans to espalier anything. I will, I will, I will."

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and author of "The New Low-Maintenance Garden." Check out her blog at www.valeaston.com.