Social Distance in Gardening II

Today’s column follows last week’s column suggesting three priorities for gardening while maintaining social distance during this difficult period. Many print and electronic media channels address the rapidly changing financial and health impacts of the coronavirus pandemic. We’re all greatly concerned about those impacts but for the moment, let’s just think about gardening.

  1. Care for Your Garden

After each year’s vernal equinox, many plants spring into growth and begin a season of vigorous development and delightful blossoms. Gardeners often can do well by simply enjoying the season through frequent walls through the garden and observing Nature’s small miracles. A good garden has a few seats to accommodate reflection, perhaps with a cool beverage. Take occasional opportunities to meditate about your plants and life.

During a recent walk garden walk, I was surprised that my Madeira Island Geranium (Geranium maderense) was blooming. I had cut it back after year’s blooms. I understood it to be a biennial and expected to wait a while for more flowers, but here it is. It’s the most giant geranium, 4-5 feet high and wide.

A large purple flower is in a garden

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This giant geranium displays an abundance of light mauve flowers.
A pink flower on a plant

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Geranium maderense commands a 5′ x 5′ space in the garden.

When you can no longer resist do some weeding. Set aside an hour or two each day to clear weeds from an area that’s large enough to make a difference and produce a Gardener’s Endorphin Rush, while small enough to complete within the budgeted hour. It’s also good mild exercise to offset the stay-at-home doldrums.

Landscapers might or might not be available for garden development and maintenance, but the National Association of Landscape Professionals advocates classification of landscape services as “essential.”

In any case, most if not all garden centers and garden exchanges are closed temporarily, so adding to your landscape might require swapping plants with gardening friends (while maintaining a healthy distance).

  • Advance Your Gardening Knowledge

Develop a learning plan to suit your individual needs and interests. For example, list your favorite plants in your garden and devote an hour a day to learning about each of them. There are excellent print resources for such a project, e.g., Sunset’s “Western Garden Book” and American Horticultural Association’s “A-Z Encyclopedia of Garden Plants.”

The Internet provides easy and free access to great amounts of gardening information. A very good place to start is Wikipedia.com, which has detailed information on almost all plants. Other good general sources are San Marcos Growers’ Plant Index, www.missouribotanicalgarden.org, and National Gardening Associations’ Plants Database.

A future column will include sources of information for specific plant genera.

The best searches will be for the plant’s botanical name , which usually can be found, if necessary, by starting with the common name. Many plant names include a cultivar name, which might be of interest, but if you’re looking primarily for cultivation advice, the genus & species will be fine.

Knowing your plants’ seasonal development and cultivation needs contributes greatly to gardening enjoyment and success.

  • Enrich Your Gardening Days

The Internet’s many social features offer the gardener both “infotainment” and addiction potential. Rationing your time to about an hour each day would be good ideas.

There’s an abundance of garden-related blogs and videos, many providing opportunities to comment or even to dialog with the producers. Here are five to check out:

Gardening Gone Wild – A group of talented gardeners bring diverse perspectives to the topic.

Success with Succulents – Debra Lee Baldwin’s website, from southern California, offers expert, non-technical advice on growing, displaying, and landscaping with succulent plants.

Garden Answer –  Laura LeBoutillier demonstrates hands-on gardening in her expansive garden in Oregon and offers practical advice. 

Plant One on Me – Summer Rayne Oaks shares her wealth of knowledge and experience with growing houseplants in Brooklyn, NY, and tours public gardens and large-scale nurseries for more ideas.

Facebook: On Gardening. Do visit my Facebook page for “garden notes,” which are brief current updates from my own garden. The examples and ideas are fully appropriate and timely for gardens and gardeners in the Monterey Bay area and other summer-dry regions.

Enjoy your gardens and gardening and stay healthy.

***

Tom Karwin is past president of Friends of the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, Monterey Bay Area Cactus & Succulent Society, and Monterey Bay Iris Society, and a Lifetime UC Master Gardener (Certified 1999–2009). Visit ongardening.com for previous columns.
Send comments or questions to gardening@karwin.com or facebook.com/thomaskarwin.

Social Distance in Gardening

Spring is here! The vernal equinox, March 19th , marked this year’s first day of spring, and we enjoy the early stages of spring growth. Here are examples:

The Australian Wonga Wonga Vine (Pandorea pandorana) produces a curtain of cream-colored blossoms. The Chinese Peony (Paeonia lactiflora): a common species with a great range of cultivars. 

The arrival of the spring season presents Natures gifts, delights our senses, and inspires our gardening urges. This has always been a welcome time of the year.

Our usual seasonal gardening activities include garden societies’ regular meetings and annual shows and sales. The early spring weeks have been filled with opportunities to share gardening ideas, techniques and plants with friends in the local community, to examine exemplary plants at regional showcases, and even to go out of town to attend national shows.

This year is different because the coronavirus threat requires everyone to avoid public contacts.

All garden-related events in the Monterey Bay area have been cancelled or are on the verge of being cancelled. Before you travel to an event of interest, verify that it is still happening!

One distant example was the 2020 Clivia Show & Sale, organized by The North American Clivia Society at the Huntington Botanical Gardens, and scheduled for last weekend. This rare event in a great location was worth considering for a major weekend trip, but alas it was cancelled, as were countless other garden events throughout California (and likely the rest of the country).

Gardeners and the gardening community are feeling multiple impacts of these cancellations. Many other elements of America and the world are being affected as well, of course, but let’s focus for the moment on gardening. The impacts include loss of interaction between like-minded members of the community, interruption in the continuity of non-profit garden societies, and loss of revenues that sustain those societies.

This situation undermines gardening’s social dimension. The good news is that gardeners have ways to stay busy and productive even while sheltering in place. Here are three ideas to consider.

The first priority is to care for your garden. Plants continue to grow during these difficult times, and to benefit from regular care by gardeners. Reserve a couple hours each rain-free day to keep your plants irrigated, pruned and weeded, and enjoy their contributions to your environment. This includes mild exercise, which keeps us healthy.

Another priority is to advance your gardening knowledge and skills. Assuming you have access to the Internet, search for information about plants you have—or would like to have—in your garden. A basic search by plant name will yield general descriptions. Searching for “how to cultivate [plant name]” will display helpful advice. Try this method on YouTube.com for video demonstrations by both amateurs and professionals.

With practice, the Internet can support your advanced education in gardening and provide a respite from binging on entertainment resources.

The third way to enrich the days of maximum social distance involves additional uses of the Internet: the social media, particularly e-mails with your gardening friends, garden-related blogs that support limited dialogs, Twitter messaging, and Facebook pages.

I have begun posting frequent “garden clips” on my long-time dormant Facebook page, with an emphasis on topics that are current to the Monterey Bay area. You are welcome to sample these clips and to comment. Browse to facebook.com/thomas.karwin.

Future columns will include ideas in support of these three constructive ways for gardeners to shelter in place.

Meanwhile, for up-to-date health information, browse to www.cdc.gov and click on “Coronavirus Disease 2019”

Take good care of yourself during these difficult times.

***

Tom Karwin is past president of Friends of the UC Santa Cruz Arboretum, Monterey Bay Area Cactus & Succulent Society, and Monterey Bay Iris Society, and a Lifetime UC Master Gardener (Certified 1999–2009). Visit ongardening.com for previous columns.
Send comments or questions to gardening@karwin.com.