When thinking about fine gardening, a very detailed image comes to my mind: a neatly planted garden with a few ornamental trees, shrubs for medium height, bulbs and corms for early spring-time blooms, summer perennial flowers dotted throughout the garden, tall spikes like foxgloves and delphiniums reaching to the sky, some grasses for texture, evergreens for winter appeal, and most importantly the ground is beautifully covered in a dark, rich composted layer that makes all those colors just POP. What doesn't make it to my perfectly imagined garden is weeds.
Some gardeners may tell you that if you have a tightly planted arrangement and the soil is top-dressed with bark or mulch, then you won't have any weeds. But that's just a lie. Sure, there will be fewer weeds--especially if your soil is top-dressed with about 4 inches of mulch every year, but you'd still have to weed the garden before applying the mulch in the spring time. The mulch acts as a barrier to prevent the weed seeds already in the soil from sprouting. What the mulch doesn't do is prevent new weed seeds that are blown in or deposited from birds from sprouting and becoming weed plants. This is why the act of weeding and weeding often is so important to maintaining a garden.
Now, what does weeding have to do with fine gardening? Well, everything! Fine gardening is the act of maintaining a densely planted garden--cultivating beauty--without the use of chemical sprays. It involves identifying weeds from not weeds and selectively removing (by hand) the weeds, while keeping the desired plants intact and undisturbed. You may be thinking that this sounds like a lot of work; and you're right! At first, removing all the weeds from your garden by hand is a very time-consuming task, especially if you have a large garden. But if you weed and weed often, then that task gets easier and quicker as your garden matures and there's (hopefully) fewer weed seeds.
Ok, so how do you hand weed a garden? I'll go into more detail in a later blog post. But for now, in the most simplest terms: identify a plant as a weed, pull the entire weed plant out of the soil (this includes all of the roots), and chuck the weed into a bin. Rinse and repeat. Do this until the entire garden is weed free (or virtually weed free) and then toss the weeds into the compost bin or make a weed-tea fertilizer to use on the garden later. That's it! No chemicals needed, no fancy tools, just you, your hands, and your brain to identify the weeds.
It does take some experience to know the difference between an ornamental plant and a weed, but you can always use an app such as Seek by iNaturalist or look up common weeds/invasive plants in your area via the appropriate Agricultural Extension Office. I'm in Washington State, and a quick search for "WA State Extension Office invasive plants" leads me to this page with a ton of information about noxious weeds and how to control them.
Now that we've gotten the weed questions under control, let's talk about maintaining those ornamental trees and shrubs. You've probably seen a landscaping crew working along the side of the road or at a commercial space where there are some trees and shrubs throughout the parking lot. They're working really hard with gas powered weed whackers, giant backpack blowers are blaring, and chances are there's someone using a hedge trimmer on a rhododendron and maybe even a Japanese lace leaf maple is being shaped into a perfect sphere. This is not fine gardening. This type of maintenance is what I like to refer to as the "mow and blow special." No disrespect to the people that work on these crews--they work super hard to complete a really difficult task, which is keeping a larger space virtually weed free and under control. But the end result leaves much to be desired.
No, Japanese lace leaf maples are not supposed to look like a lollipop. And neither is any other tree or shrub (except for the occasional topiary or boxwood artfully shaped into a dragon or some other mythical creature). Trees and shrubs should be treated as unique individuals, whereby pruning is done selectively branch-by-branch to enhance the natural growth characteristics. This is another time consuming endeavor that, done correctly, will take less and less time as the garden matures. Moreover, the payoff in visual esthetics of fine pruning is worth millions and it's much healthier for the plant (more about that in another post).
Last on the maintenance list are perennial flowers and grasses. I'm lumping these two categories together here because they both need some annual zhooshing to keep healthy. For instance, some grasses die back and turn brown in the autumn when they're getting ready for winter dormancy. This is when you cut the grasses down to the ground, remove the dead blades of grass, and wait for spring-time when new grass blades are grown from the same roots. The same is true for lots of flowers like iris, crocosmia, and daisies; when the plant is done blooming and photosynthesizing for the season, the plant will stop flowering and then the greenery will turn brown. This is when the plant is cut down to the soil (roots remain undisturbed) and dead plant material is removed and tossed in the compost. This type of annual maintenance will keep plants healthy and the garden looking tidy even during the bare winter months. I like to refer to this process as perennial autumn clean-up.
So, to recap, fine gardening is:
A densely planted, diversified garden;
Where the soil is top-dressed with compost, mulch, and sometimes bark;
Has weeds removed by hand (not chemically treated);
The trees and shrubs are selectively pruned to enhance natural growth characteristics;
And perennial flowers and grasses are cut back in the autumn.
Remember, gardens come in many shapes and sizes--both large and small--but it's the process of fine gardening that distinguishes these spaces and makes them appear more natural.
What does your version of fine gardening look like?
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