Garden Gifts - Gifts for the Garden

The holiday season of giving and getting has arrived, even in the garden. Replacing the shopping mall’s profusion of commercial tinsel and repetitive tunes is a subdued landscape that soothes the spirit and suggests a theater where only the music of songbirds is heard.

Gifts from the garden, abundant and free for the taking, will soon adorn our homes with the colors and texture of nature: evergreen boughs (boxwood, yew, pine and blue spruce); grapevine wreaths; branches (bittersweet, pyracantha, juniper, viburnum and privet) loaded with berries of orange, blue, red or black; fruits of the harvest (red apples, golden quince, red chiles and pine cones); fan-shaped flowers of maiden grass; dried rose hips; and containers of bulbs (daffodils and grape hyacinths dug from crowded clumps in the garden and potted up in early October) to nudge into wintertime flowering.

Gifts to the garden also rank high on the holiday list during this often-hectic time. As winter’s deep dormancy closes in, the temptation might be to forsake and forget garden activities, but bestowing bountiful attention on a serene landscape is the first order of the season.

Such a gift might appear trivial when compared with the vibrant activities of springtime pruning, summertime maintenance, or fall planting; however, spreading buckets and buckets of compost or other organic mulch on beds and borders now will endow the garden with a robust ability to repay the gift in spades next season, especially in the face of our continuing drought.

Soil gets depleted of nitrogen and other nutrients over time, worn-out by active plant growth and washed-out by irrigation practices. Compost is nature’s way of recycling, a biological process in which organic materials are broken down into a soil-like substance that serves as groundcover, mulch and soil conditioner.

But in our often too-eager desire for a “neatnik” landscape, we circumvent this essential process by raking beds bare of leaves and other clippings. This robs the garden of its ability to conserve whatever meager moisture we might receive in coming months and to regulate soil temperatures (thereby avoiding the freeze-thaw cycles that occur with our extreme fluctuations between sunny daytime temperatures and clear, cold nighttime ones that cause the soil to heave and break tender plant roots).

Leaves break down more quickly if they are run over with a lawn mower before collection, and the golden key to even speedier composting is moisture. Adding a shovelful of rich soil to introduce microbes will further speed the process along, reducing it from a year or so to as little as seven months for a finished product.

Roses, especially hybrid teas and other less-hardy varieties, should receive a whopping dose of compost or other organic mulch to aid in keeping them healthy. Even dormant canes continue to lose moisture during this cold, often dry and windy, season. I dump a five-gallon bucket of compost around the crown area of each rose by mid-month, hilling it up to a depth of 6 to 12 inches, where it serves to nurture and protect the crown and canes during the coldest months. There it remains until I begin rose pruning in early to mid-April and even then I don’t remove it. I simply spread it into a thinner layer over nearby areas where it continues its work of soil conditioning.

Another gift to the garden will be a final deep watering of trees and shrubs before the ground freezes, to carry them through in case we fail to receive enough of that coveted thing called snow or rain. They, too, will appreciate an inch or two depth of mulch, but avoid placing it too near the trunks of trees where it might conceal undesirable insects.

A third gift to the garden, so to speak, is to cut back only the foliage on those plants that might harbor diseases and insects and leave all else to act as a self-mulching blanket. Those that require cutting back include the foliage of peonies that offers refuge to botrytis, a fungus that causes blighted flower buds in the spring, and the fern-like foliage of asparagus that is likely to shelter the larvae of the asparagus beetle by allowing it to over-winter and wreak havoc on emerging springtime spears.

While spreading mulch and cutting back selected plants, I also gift the garden by shaking dried flower heads as I remove spent annual plants, allowing them to release their seeds to self-sow in the garden when the soil warms again in early spring. Larkspur, bachelor’s button, nigella, marigold, cosmos, nicotiana and poppy seeds, along with herbs, such as borage, arugula and dill, will germinate and deliver a welcome gift of new plants in due season.