Disappointment in the Garden

Here’s a fun game, walk into the loveliest garden in your neighborhood and ask the gardener about their failures. Chances are, you will hear such a tale of woe and madness that you will be forced to grope blindly for the nearest box of Kleenex. Lovely gardens are built on heartbreak; they are built on experiments gone wrong, on mistakes, on failure. There are so many ways to fail, in fact, it is a wonder that any of us continue to try.

Besides the wrong weather at the wrong time (too hot, too cold, too dry, too wet) there is also the mislabeled plant, insect infestation, damage from other critters (both domestic and wild) and, finally, stupidity. And by “stupidity” I mean both lack of knowledge as well as willful bullheadedness. We plant things that were never meant to grow in our neck of the woods, stick them in the wrong place without properly preparing the soil, neglect them, and then become outraged when they fail to flourish.

Take poppies, for example. As a young gardener I made many attempts to grow Oriental poppies with zero success, until I finally learned that Oriental poppies do not like hot, dry climates and furthermore they need a period of freezing temperatures to grow. But for several years I ordered Oriental poppies from garden catalogs under the mistaken belief that they would not sell them to me if Oriental poppies did not grow in my area. Ha! Perhaps somewhere in Southern California a gardener has outwitted the elements and enjoys lovely Oriental poppies that return every year, but that fantastical outcome never happened for me.

So having moved to a state which does experience a brief period of sub-freezing temperatures, I at once ran the nearest nursery and bought some Oriental poppies and planted them. Year after year I planted them, and year after year they melted into the soil without even a hint of a flower. I know that somewhere in North Carolina a gardener is growing a virtual forest of Oriental poppies, but not in my backyard. So I have come to rely on other members of the poppy family. Unfortunately I don’t like the color red, especially not the orange-red that is so common among poppies.

Not liking the color red is a big handicap to a gardener. One year I planted a few hundred “pink mix” tulips and mostly what came up were bright red tulips. I spent that spring weeding out the red. That was 5 years ago and as tulips tend to die out in the NC garden only a few tulips have appeared this spring. Every single one of them is flagrantly scarlet.

I am also still trying to rectify the red gladioli problem of 3 years ago. I sent away for 50 gladioli of the softest, palest baby pink. Unfortunately what came up in the garden were gladiolas of the fiercest, brightest orange-red. They had been mislabeled. The shipper was notified but of course that season was shot and I had to wait until the following spring to get my pink glads. In the mean time I did not get all the red out—I had planted them in and under roses and some of them escaped my trowel. Gladioli proliferate mightily in the NC garden with the result that I have red gladiolas every spring popping up like weeds.

But back to poppies.

Last year I decided I wanted poppies in profusion. Not red poppies, of course, but soft pink, apricot, peach, cream and white poppies, double poppies, preferably. So I sewed seed like a mad woman, ounces and ounces of seed. I bought it in bulk and I bought it in small packets. I bought it in hardware stores, garden shops and on-line. I even bought seed on eBay. And all the seed was labeled as pink or white poppies.

I got lots of poppies. Mostly red. I tore out the red, and reveled in the lovely double pink poppies with their translucent, delicate petals like silken fairy ball gowns. And when the season was over, I saved the seeds and scattered them about. Hundreds of feet of flower bed scattered with thousands of seeds have resulted in three plants this spring. The flowers have yet to open, but what are the chances that they will be red?