Imperfections in the garden

What a time for my garden to be suffering from prickly heat. In just one week I would be welcoming a tour group of forty from the American Association of Botanical Gardens and Arboreta. There would be no pulling the wool over the eyes of these plant detectives. They can spot leaf scorch and magnesium deficiency at ten paces.

So I scuffled around trying to hide the evidence of heat and drought in the garden. I noticed that the weather stress showed up in curious ways, like isolated eruptions or boils. And then I got sidetracked with a bit of word association that led me down memory lane, to the day I decided to leave news reporting and plow into the gardening world full time.

I had been a reporter for CHCH TV for nearly twenty years - most of it was better than good. But the last few gasping years were not so great - and one fateful day I was sent to Delhi to cover a story about a missing man. His name was something plain like Tom Asher - but he was also known as Boils Asher, because his face was dotted with - oh, you can guess the rest.

Boils was missing for 23 years before anybody bothered to tell the police. So there I was sitting in the Delhi police station taking notes about a guy who walked out to the corner store in 1974, never returned, and really I guess nobody noticed. I went back to Hamilton, put the story together for the 6pm news, and decided, "I'm outta here."

So the link this story has to the garden tour is that as I ran around the acreage sprucing up, I noticed how many ugly things caught my eye - about as ugly as a boil.

Brick on the house that needed pointing, rubblestone foundation with curious gaps, paint splattered on the clematis, vent pipes for the gas water heater protruding into a laneway, a fence made of premium Canadian lumber, so twisted it looked corkscrew hazel. You get the picture.

Right on time, the bus chugged up and disgorged the garden goers. They marched right down the laneway past the vent pipes, down the stairs, and down the garden path before I could warn them about the various pratfalls that could be provoked by our 40-degree slope.

I caught some nametags from Detroit, Seattle, Connecticut, and New York.

One visitor told me my Oakleaf Mountain Ash "wasn't long for this world."

Another one spied a special Daphne, "That's Briggs Moonlight isn't it? How do you keep it alive? Our botanical garden ordered 30, and 28 of them are dead."

A hawk-eyed horticulturist spotted my special Cornus alternifolia 'Variegata'. "The only way to have a mature specimen of that plant is to move somewhere where it's full grown."

Gosh, I think I could have had the Shroud of Turin on display, and all they would have noticed would be plants with brown leaves.

Two colleagues from Gardener's Journal helped me with flow control. I asked them hopefully if they had had any interesting questions.

Lisa Hardie reported that many of the visitors seemed to be fascinated by the purple nail polish on her toes. And that most of the men were sneaking pictures not of plants, but of a big orange contraption churning away on the harbour behind us, that was harvesting weeds.

"Sorry Kathy," offered Lisa, "but you know how men like trucks."

My other colleague, Monica Presta-Fox was really in the thick of things. She was stationed at the punch bowl.

"Oh, they really liked the punch," Monica reported.

They should have, it had two bottles of Sauvignon Blanc in it.

As I predicted a few columns ago, when people are on garden tours in August, and it's hot, and the cicadas are grating away, they really are happy to find a bit of shade and a splash of alcohol. I don't blame them.

In about forty short minutes, the tour goers turned on their heels, their Tilley and pork pie hats spinning on their heads, and high tailed it for any place with AC.

Monica, Lisa, my husband Bob and myself bee-lined it for the shade, a bottle of wine and a debriefing.

Yes, I stand guilty on all counts. The Oakleaf Mountain Ash is in miserable shape. The leaves are turning brown, and the trunk looks like it was zapped by ground-penetrating radar. It is a welcome target for fireblight, canker, roundheaded borer and sawflys. I've been apologizing since the day I planted it 15 years ago. The only beneficial duty it performs right now, is blocking the maximum security prison lighting in the CN yard in the distance.

In the case of the Daphne with the death sentence, yes it may be with us for just a brief time. The common complaint with most Daphnes is that they die a lingering death just when they are adding real landscape value to the garden. They do need perfect drainage, but even with that they seem to succumb to what really is natural causes. Think of all of them, the ethereal 'Briggs Moonlight' included, as "on loan" to the garden. Enjoy their soft leaves, and intoxicating spring fragrance while you can.

While we poked and prodded at these observations under the shade of the Porcelain Vine ("that's banned at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden you know!") our longtime friend Brian Holley dropped in.

Holley is Director of the Cleveland Botanical Garden, but our friendship is rooted in his days at the Royal Botanical Gardens Teaching Garden in Hamilton. He was the mastermind of a marvelous herb garden there, and when you dropped in for a visit, he always seemed to be making strawberry jam, and brewing up excellent Bodum coffee. Now he is charge of a 45 Million expansion in Cleveland, and loving every minute of it.

"Your garden looks great Kathy," he said as he sat with his back to the view, and his hand gripping a glass of Blackstone Merlot.

"But whatever possessed you to plant that Cornus alternifolia 'Variegata' there? It will never survive."