My Gardens ~ My Environment

Carol of May Dreams Garden invites us to share buds and blossoms on the fifteenth of each month, calling it Garden Bloggers Bloom Day. October 15th of this year has been named Blog Action Day with bloggers invited to post on the environment. I thought about both of these concepts as I wandered around with the camera, then flipped through old photo albums.

Philo & I enjoyed our first vacation as a family in 1970, driving from our small apartment in a Chicago suburb to a cottage in Wisconsin. We liked the lake, the trees and the hikes through the hills, and our toddlers had fun with their Tonka trucks, making roads in the soil around the porch, studding the ground with rocks and sticks. We were saving money to buy a house, one with soil for tomatoes and flowers, with shrubs and trees around it. It would be our own chunk of the greater environment...what Webster defines as the "air, water, minerals, organisms, and all other external factors surrounding and affecting a given organism at any time".

1970 was a year filled with war, destruction, monsoons, Kent State, space exploration, strikes, explosions and the break-up of the Beatles, but in ecology and the environment there were signs of hope: Mother Earth News was first published in 1970, Earth Day was declared for Sunday, April 22, 1970 and in December the Environmental Protection Agency was founded. The focus on insecticides and weedkillers intensified and by the time we had the down payment for that house the weedkiller DDT had been banned. The US government stopped using Agent Orange in Vietnam, and the connection to lawn weedkillers like 2 4-D became public. Robert Rodale spread the word on organic gardening in press and on television.

By the time we moved into our first house in 1973, it seemed logical to avoid pesticides and weedkillers on the land where our children would play, to use compost, to grow vegetables and fruit and to plant lots of trees, shrubs and flowers. It still seems logical 35 years later.

I like to read about everyone's gardens and it usually doesn't matter that we don't grow the same things, or live in the same zone or dig in similar soil. We can share a love of gardening without needing much in common.

But when it comes to advice about how to garden responsibly in a specific garden, something positive is needed - advice based in personal experience focusing on local information. Clipped and pasted pronouncements intended for general distribution may work in one place, and be useless somewhere else.

Allen Lacy told us, "It is impossible to write a book on gardening that is universal. Everyone gardens in the highly particular, on one spot of home ground at the intersection of this degree of latitude and that degree of longitude."

I miss those highway signs in Texas that encouraged us to 'Drive Friendly'. They seemed positive rather than negative, implying that people knew what was right if they followed their best instincts and were flexible about who got to the stopsign first. So I won't give you orders on what you should do in your garden, but let's look at some flowers as I share my attempts to 'Plant Friendly' on my little spot of home ground here in the NW part of Austin, Texas.

To have beauty without spraying I can choose plants with some built-in disease resistence - like the 'Julia Child' rose, with a bloom or bud in evidence every day since April.

It's not in my power to remove and replace every plant on the City of Austin's invasive list, but I can cut the flowers off nandina to prevent seed development and clip any berries I can reach from the ligustrum where it hangs over the fence from my neighbors' yard. I do this so the birds won't eat them and spread seeds in natural areas. I think a certain amount of flat green grass is necessary for comfort, as a design element, and for my sanity, so I won't dig up all of my casual, seldom watered, but acceptable-to-me lawn. [And like Carol of May Dreams, I actually like to mow.]

But I can and will shrink the lawn - we've already replaced some of it with plants for people, birds, bees and butterflies. Here's a garden for birds and butterflies, planted in the footprint where the Arizona Ash used to grow. Another thing I can do is to try out environmental ideas that take effort rather than money - like my in-progress seep garden to slow down storm runoff. Native plants Rivina humilis/pigeon-berry and White mistflower/Ageratina havanensis are young and still getting established.

I can learn to be flexible and take advantage of the unexpected in the garden - when a huge limb fell off the pecan last month all the shade plants were suddenly in sunlight.
The impatiens found space in shade near the Cast Iron plants and now the native Barbados Cherry/Malpighia glabra has enough sun to make buds.

I can try to water with care and attention and respect, appreciating the labor of those who came before us to this land of violent floods and killing drought to build the dams and reservoirs which make it possible for our city to thrive.

I'm willing to handwater my tropicals and other beautiful plants - like the clematis - this is a small garden and I think beauty is worth the trouble. But when choosing permanent landscape plants for the harsher western exposures, I'll look for tougher plants - native and adapted ones that need less supplemental water. That's what we did in a triangular area where the lawn turned brown too easily - the flowers in the pink entrance garden are doing well and are more fun.

When I talk to my neighbors I can tell them the reasons we won't use things like weed and feed while sharing divisions of plants from my borders. My neighbors may never be reconciled to the way I keep the lawn, but they may not be able to resist flowers, butterflies and hummingbirds.

Blooming off camera:
Lantanas
Pentas
Moon Vine
Buddlejas
Angel's Trumpet
Plumbago
Salvias greggii, leucantha and 'Nuevo Leon',
Cupheas
White ginger
Oxalis
Evolvolus
Rock rose/ Pavonia
Portulaca
Dianthus
Plumerias

Edited October 23 - Mr Brown Thumb has gathered links to other garden blogs with posts for Blog Action Day.