Gardens as Tools

Following recent surgery, I felt too fatigued and sore for even light gardening. Those limitations lasted about one week, after which I could again put in several hours on easy—and overdue— tasks: weeding, installing small plants, pruning, all of which helped a lot in my recovery.

This episode stimulated thoughts of the garden’s many functions beyond pleasing the eye, feeding the stomach and providing regular light exercise.

Without minimizing the direct benefits of ornamental and edible gardening, consider the types of therapeutic gardens: healing, meditation, contemplation, and restorative.

“Healing” means helping individuals to overcome physical, mental, emotional or spiritual challenges.

“Meditation” involves deepening personal knowledge and attaining inner peace.

“Contemplation” involves thoughtfully examining issues larger than oneself, perhaps in a religious or mystical manner.

“Restoration” refers to returning to an ideal or normal state from a stressed or agitated state, or from boredom or difficulty in focusing.

A garden designed to help individuals to overcome physical challenges is described as an accessible garden. The design typically emphasizes raised beds, tall enough to provide easy access to the gardener who cannot kneel, or finds it difficult to do so. (Rising from kneeling could be just as challenging.) There are also convenient tools, e.g., rolling seats, tools with long handles, telescoping pruners, for gardeners who have grown to be less than spry.

Other kinds of accessible gardens are designed for gardeners with partial or complete loss of sight, emphasizing blossom fragrance or plant texture over appearance, to favor smell or touch.

No garden, however accessible or well intentioned actually effects any healing or restoration. Only the gardener who desires to be healed or restored can achieve such outcomes. In this perspective, the garden is not the cure, only the gardener’s tool.

The focus on the gardener is the same for meditation and contemplation gardens, which offer only nature’s calm environment to invite the gardener to forget for the moment personal stresses and the busy world’s demands, and to consider issues greater than “why snails?”

There’s one more type of therapeutic garden: the motivational garden, which helps those who may be bored or having difficulty in focusing.  Once we have begun gardening, and experienced the satisfaction of seeing plants grow under our hands, even a brief visit to the garden stimulates the urge to pull a weed, deadhead a faded blossom, or move a misplaced specimen to a better spot.

Gardens are valuable tools for many special purposes; many gardeners find them therapeutic on all occasions.

More

The American Horticultural Therapy Association provides its definitions and positions regarding therapeutic gardening.

The American Society of Landscape Architects offers an interesting essay, “The Therapeutic Garden— A Definition.”

Pinterest (which collects photos on various topics from many sources has several unorganized groups on topics related to therapeutic gardens. A search on “horticultural therapy ideas” yields this collection, which demonstrates the wide range of ideas that people associate with “horticultural therapy.”

 

Plants for Rock Gardens

Many different plants could be included in a rock garden. The usual design approach limits plant selection to low-growing varieties, but this is not a necessary constraint.

A brief study of the vegetation on a naturally occurring rocky landscape would help in designing a realistic rock garden for a residential landscape.

Some travel could be required to locate one or more good examples; this could be a pleasant weekend excursion with a clear purpose, especially if one knows where to find rocky landscapes. Ask around!

Once found, rocky landscapes might include one or more trees of various sizes, as well as shrubs and smaller plants. Clearly, proximity to rocks does not limit the size of plants.

A rock Garden in July

A late July scene in the rock garden of the University of British Columbia Botanical Garden; photo by Todd Boland.

The assumption that rock garden plants should be low-growing specimens probably relates to alpine gardens, which have inspired many rock gardens. Alpine gardens feature plants that grow naturally in high-altitude, mountainous areas, which typically have large stones and much gravel, low temperatures, low moisture, and poor soil nutrition. Plants that survive under such conditions might very well be small in overall size and low growing.

Developing an authentic alpine garden, however, involves reproducing the challenging conditions in which alpine plants are found. There are alpine varieties of some familiar garden varieties, e.g., Campanula, Dianthus, Geranium, Phlox, Primula, Ranunculus, Sedum, Sisyrinchium, Thyme. If such plants were to be grown in a moderate climate, in rich soil and with ample moisture, they would respond with more lush growth and greater size than they would in a true alpine garden.

Rock gardens should not be confused with alpine gardens. In fact, rocky landscapes can and do occur in a wide range of climates, with the only common characteristic being exposed rocks. So, in planting a rock garden, the gardener should first select plants that will thrive in the local environment. The Monterey Bay area’s climate supports a wide range of choices.

The rock garden designer still might want to emphasize low growing plants to keep the vegetation in scale with the surrounding landscape and the rock garden itself, and to keep the rocks visible (they might have required a significant investment).

Another consideration is the relationship of the plants to each other. This perspective might lead to developing a plant community, i.e., a grouping of plants that grow together in nature. Other possibilities include a thematic approach, e.g., a white garden or an analogous or complementary color scheme. In our moderate local climate, the designer also might plan for year-round seasonal color, or for interesting contrasts of foliage or structure.

There are many possibilities, but the most successful and satisfying landscape plans always are based on a plan of some description, rather than a series of impulsive decisions.

More

Alpine Garden Society – Plants –This is a thoroughly amazing website, a vast treasure trove of images and information about alpine plants. At the site, click on “AGS Encyclopedia” then on either “Families,” “Genera,” Species,” or “Authors” for encyclopedic information. (I found “Genera” most useful.)

sizedClass-1-second_SAXIFRAGA PANICULATA_Class1-1_ MANNLICHEN, BERNESE OBERLAND, SWITZERLAND JUNE 201228882

 

The image above came from Images/Photographic Competition/Previous Winners/AGS Photographic Competition, 2012 – Winners

The website invites—and requires—exploration to discover its many riches.

North American Rock Garden Society – Another good source of plant images and descriptions. Not as extensive as the Alpine Garden Society’s website, but helpful as an introduction to rock garden plants. At the site, click on “Plants” for the entry to lists and images.

Rock Gardens & Ground Covers A page of unorganized photos submitted to Pinterest. Interesting to scroll through, to see some very good plant pictures, some attractive designs (more or less naturalistic) and some truly bad designs (but that’s one person’s opinion).

Scottish Rock Garden Club – This website provides free access to many back issues of The International Rock Gardener, an excellent publication.

Rock Gardening

Garden renovation projects might include mounds to add visual interest in an otherwise flat terrain, and also to provide drainage and other benefits of raised beds. A particular form of the garden mound is the rock garden, based on a natural or simulated outcrop of rocks.

An outcrop could occur in a flat area, but are most common—and look most realistic when created—on a slope, where erosion over time would have exposed the underling rock formation. If your property includes an area that has a slope of ten degrees or more, and full exposure to the sun, you have a good site for a rock garden. Never mind if it lacks rocks: they can be trucked in from a stone yard.

Lacking a sloped area, the gardener could develop a rock garden on a mound, and should not be reluctant to do so, but should avoid the look of “a dog’s grave,” which results when an isolated bump is placed in a lawn. A mounded rock garden will have a naturalistic appearance when is has substantial size appropriate to the setting, and a backdrop of shrubs, trees, wall or hills.

Another contributor to a natural look is a scree boundary. The base of a natural rock outcrop often will have a loose accumulation of smaller stones and rock chips, called “scree.” So, where sufficient space is available, include a scree bed about two feet wide between the rock garden and the adjacent lawn or pathway. The scree bed should have a foundation of about eight inches of scree compost (1 part topsoil, 1 part compost, 3 parts gravel). An edging would help to contain the stones.

Acquiring and placing rocks will be the most expensive, strenuous and aesthetically challenging part of the project. Here are recommended guidelines:

  • Use one kind of stone, preferably one that occurs naturally in the area. Traditionally, rock gardens use limestone or sandstone, but in the Monterey Bay area Sonoma fieldstone, an igneous rock (basalt or rhyolite), is widely available and popular.
  • Commit to the project. Include boulders (stones too large for one person to move) even though they can be difficult to place in desired positions.
  • Contract with the stone yard deliver materials to as close as possible to their eventual location.
  • Position stones for a natural appearance: larger stones will be uphill of smaller stones; some stones might be close to other stones.
  • Bury stones one-third to one-half of their vertical dimension. Stones rarely are found atop the soil.

A rock garden is just one use of stones in garden design. Stones are also used for walls, borders of beds, walkways or patios. All such uses can be attractive in the garden, partly because of the contrast between the surfaces of stones and plants. Recognize, however, the differences between naturalistic rock gardens and these other uses, in which stones are used as building materials.

More

20 Fabulous Rock Garden Design Ideas —from Decoist.com. These images show fine designs that demonstrate a variety of uses of rocks in the landscape. Not all designs could be called naturalistic.

 

Rock Garden Ideas — 112 images of rock gardens, ranging from naturalistic designs to “whimsical” ideas. Test yourself on whether these designs follow or violate the five design guidelines listed in this article.

Alpine Garden Society – This society is based in the British Isles, where rock gardens first became popular. Gardeners in the United States have developed many rock gardens, but not with the enthusiastic commitment evident in England.

The Rock Garden – Very good how-to article by Alan Grainger, with sufficient information to guide a novice project.  Visit the website, The Alpine Garden for many related garden and plant photos, book reviews and other resources.

Betty Ford Alpine Gardens A large and varied place, designed for visits (not so much for web browsing). This could be the most highly developed public rock garden in the United States.

How to Build Rock Gardens From About.com – This website illustrates a “rockery,” a garden design that is based on rocks, but which does not pretend to a natural look. This might also be called a “dog’s grave.”

Poisoning the Pollinators

It’s about time for National Pollinator Week, June 16–23. Check it out at Polllintaor Partnership.

Big agriculture uses many synthetic chemicals. Consumers are concerned by neonicotinoids (“neonics”), which are sprayed on nearly all cornfields, which the U.S. Department of Agriculture projects this year will cover an area equal nearly the size of California.  Neonics also are sprayed on many garden center plants, and are used on seeds used to grow soy, wheat, cotton, sorghum, peanuts and other crops.

These chemicals persist in soils, travel through plants and poison nectar and pollen. USDA scientists found an average of nine pesticides and fungicides in a sample of plants. The contaminated pollen is eaten by hive bees, which pollinate many of the plants we eat, and many wild bees, which pollinate 90% of all flowering plants.

Neonics do not to kill bees, but seem to reduce the bees’ ability to resist infection by a parasitic fungus and could make bees more susceptible to the parasitic Varroa mite. Researchers at Harvard University also suspect that neonics impair honeybee’s memory, cognition or behavior, and damage their ability to navigate back to their hive.

Increasingly, research indicates that neonics contribute to “Colony Collapse Disorder,” which refers to the sudden decline of entire beehives. During the past five years, some 30% of bees in the United States have simply disappeared. This is about 50% greater than the expected rate.

The Environmental Protection Agency now requires that neonic product labels include a bee hazard icon and directions to minimize use where bees and other pollinators could forage, or where sprays could drift to hives or “pollinator attractive habitats.” Sadly, the EPA’s labels do not address neonic-treated seeds, which also affect bees.

In July of 2013, the Saving America’s Pollinators Act (H.R 2692) was introduced. This bill would suspend the use of neonics until proven safe, and harmless to pollinators. Observers give the bill a zero chance to become law.

Meanwhile, the principal producers of neonics, Bayer and Syngenta, insist that CCD is not caused by their pesticides, but by parasites, pathogens, loss of habitat and other factors. Monsanto, which treats its seeds with neonics, joins in these arguments.

As private and public interests clash, home gardeners can help to protect our pollinators:

  • Buy only certified-organic seeds and plant starts.
  • Eliminate synthetic chemical pesticides from your garden.
  • Plant wildflowers to attract and feed bees.
  • Leave part of your landscape natural for solitary-living native bees.
  • Ask your congressman to support the Saving America’s Pollinators Act.

A world without bees means a world without flowers!

Mote

Several organizations have posted formation about problems for honeybees.. Interested readers can conduct their own search for “Colony Collapse Disorder” or related search terms.  Here are some websites that I have found to be informative.

For more information for residential gardeners, see the brochure, “Bee Safe Gardening Tips,” by Bee Action and Friends of the Earth.

For a n analysis of the position taken by producers of neonics, see Michele Simon’s well-research report, “Follow the Honey: 7 was pesticide companies are spinning the bee crisis tg protect profits.” This report also is distributed by Bee Action and Friends of the Earth.

Another interesting and useful paper from Friends of the Earth, for home gardeners, is
Gardeners Beware: Bee-Toxic Pesticides Found in “Bee-Friendly” Plants Sold at Garden Centers Nationwide. It should not be surprising that garden centers, especially the big box stores, want to eliminate insects on the plants they sell, and use insecticides for that purpose, but it might be surprising to learn that about half the time those insecticides are toxic to honeybees.

Other websites to check out include the following:

Beyond Pesticides This site is about all pollinators, not just honeybees. In particular, see th recent article “Not Longer a BIG Mystery,” which concludes that there is no longer any ambiguity about the impact of synthetic chemicals on bees and other pollinators.

Melissa Garden A great source of information about Plants for Pollinators and information about bees.  (“Melissa” is a Greek word meaning honeybee.)

The Xerces Society An authoritative —and interesting—site for invertebrate conservation, with a focus on bees and butterflies and other threatened invertebrates,