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Plant Life By Valerie Easton
7 Deadly SinsThe fool things gardeners do
April Fools' Day is all about silliness and subterfuge, and there are plenty of both in the garden world. Sure, you'll probably concede the silliness, but subterfuge? How about the gardener who tried to disguise near-dead alliums with glittery purple spray paint? (I recently saw this offered as a "hot tip" in a gardening magazine.) Or the woman I ran into at a perfectly good nursery who pulled me aside to whisper that she really was a (name another great nursery) person. What does any of this have to do with planting a seed and watching it grow? Not much, really. And while we're on the subject: 1. Lock up the Crocs: So what is it with people wearing those perforated gardening clogs out in public as if they are real shoes? Not since early-20th-century fashionistas emulated Vita Sackville West's jodhpurs-and-boots getup has a look so thoroughly jumped the garden fence into the wider world. But how did Crocs, in shades like fuchsia and lime, become so cool that people actually wear them with business attire? These rubbery resin shoes, made to repel odor and be hosed off, are ideal to wear when spraying fish fertilizer, but that doesn't explain why more than a hundred million people bought Crocs last year. 2. Cut the hortitorture: You'd think that here, in the birthplace of PlantAmnesty, an organization devoted to ridding the world of plant mutilation, we'd have learned to prune. Yet every day I see horrifying examples of whacked-off trees and pitiful shrubs never intended to be such a shape. In a city of views, we need to realize tree branches are a perfect frame. If you don't buy that, then remove the offending tree rather than hack on it. Your right to disfigure plants ends where they meet my eye. 3. Get dirty: Too often when I ask someone about their garden they say something like, "Oh, I don't know, I just wrote a check and went to Europe, and it was finished when I got back." OK, this may be the outer edge of pretension, but still, if you can't be up-close-and-personal with your own garden, where can you be? 4. Ban a Canna: My guess is that the hard winter of '06 may have frozen out this trend for good. While a few gardeners, like Bainbridge artists Little and Lewis, are masters enough to create a separate, magical world to suit their exotic plants, this isn't the norm. More often our lust for the tropical look causes us to forget where we live, with jarringly artificial results. I'm thinking that so many have died in this winter's onslaught (my tree fern, for example) that gardeners, being a thrifty bunch, will give up, or at least cut way back, on tropicals. 5. Pay to play: Speaking of thrifty, get over it when it comes to plants. So often people ask me where they can find a plant cheaper. The bottom line is we've chosen an expensive hobby. Not that I'm against a little bargain shopping, but if we don't support our quality nurseries, we won't have such a great range of exciting plants available to us. Nurseries are costly businesses to run, and with plants as much as anything, you get what you pay for. 6. Botanical shmotanical: It's true that Latin trinomials are the only way to precisely name a plant. Yet these tongue-twisters are too often used to impress or intimidate rather than communicate. Most of the time, "primrose" rather than Primula and "cypress" rather than Chamaecyparis work just fine while helping reduce the garden snobbery quotient just a little. 7. Pursue with purity: From trend spotting to gadgetry, we're spending and competing our way into garden angst. Our beloved pursuit has become big business, with all the attendant marketing and publicity you'd expect in an industry where 91 million households gardened as of 2005. My vote for the product not to buy is a robot lawnmower called a LawnBott, complete with docking station and rain sensors. The top-of-the line model costs $2,499, and the marketing pitch is that now you can mow the lawn without leaving your living room. And that's no April fool. Valerie Easton is a author of "A Pattern Garden." Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net.
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