Shrub Planting Season

Autumn in Minnesota has always been my favorite time of year. The heat and humidity of July and August are replaced by comfortable days and nights that are cool enough to sleep with the window open. I love that the mosquitoes all die after the first frost. I love the colors; to me the golds, reds, and oranges are even more beautiful than spring's whites, pinks, and lavenders.

When it comes to the garden, I love the fact that it's shrub planting season!

Fall is the best time to plant shrubs because the heat of summer has passed and the new plants will be less stressed after they are planted so that they can quickly set strong new roots. While they do so they are less likely to dry out in the cooler air. If you plant them in the spring, you have an entire summer of careful watering to look forward to, but in the fall you only have a few more weeks of warm weather before the ground freezes.

The second great reason to plant shrubs now is that many stores and nurseries are off-loading their summer stock, reducing them by as much as 50%! Any time I can get something half off, I am a happy woman. The drawbacks are that the selection is not as great in the fall as it is in the spring and you have to be careful that the plants you purchase aren't showing signs of stress from being pot-bound. This year, I found some beautiful plants at a local department store, including:

1 Autumn Jazz Viburnum

3 Dwarf Burning Bushes

2 Dwarf Alberta Spruce

3 Emerald Beauty Arborvitae

1 Summer Wine Ninebark

1 Dappled Willow

1 Black Lace Elderberry

1 Red Twig Dogwood.

They have all been planted around the edges of my backyard.

I'm putting a shrub wall around my backyard because part of the not-beauty of my current landscape comes from the fact that my backyard has different materials bounding it on all sides. Two of my three neighbors have fences, one a tall, solid privacy fence, the other a short picket fence which offers no privacy. The third neighbor has no fence at all and our yard feeds right into theirs with no boundary except a couple of apple trees we planted a few years ago. Rather than putting up a third fence of our own, I'm trying to plant a hedge that will act as a screen between me and my neighbors, that will camouflage their disparate building materials, and will make a welcoming oasis for my family and myself.

After planting everything I bought (except for the two Dwarf Alberta Spruces; they are going in pots) I find that I've got about a third as many shrubs as I'll need. Awesome. Now I have something to look forward to next fall!

Wouldn't you know it...

It's Murphy's Law, isn't it? Anything that can go wrong will. The day after I started my blog and announced to the world that I'm going to start beautifying my garden, it started to rain, and it rained for the next three days. Rain is good for gardens but bad for gardening, at least if you have a list of jobs you want to do that require digging in the dirt it is. I know from my farm girl days that it's a bad idea to work with your soil when it is soaking wet, because if you do you will pack it down into something resembling a brick, and nothing grows in a brick. So, since since I can't dig in my soil, I've decided to utilize the breaks in the rain to start beautifying above the ground. As things currently stand, that leaves me with two choices: weeding and deadheading. Today I will focus on weeding.


Weeding is a task that I have traditionally found reasons not to do. It is, after all, not the most exciting of jobs, but like anything else, there is a price to be paid for negligence. The price for not weeding is this: exponentially more weeds next year. The years that I have actually had the motivation to weed religiously have been followed by years with noticeably fewer weeds. The years when I have ignored the weeds, just the opposite.


Beyond the propagation effect, the need for weeding is, perhaps, self-explanatory. Weeds steal food and water from, and can crowd out, the plants that you want to have in your garden. They tend to spread prolifically when they find a spot that they like, and, if you aren't careful, within a few years your perennial beds can become weed beds that leave you with little choice but to rip everything out and start completely over. My planting beds have not, yet, gotten to that point, but there are more weeds out there than there should be for two reasons. Reason number one is my aforementioned procrastination, and reason number two is that I have mixed feelings about what constitutes a weed.


I find some of those 'weeds' very beautiful. One of my hobbies is seeking out native plants in the wild places they grow and when I find these plants in my garden I have hard time just pulling them out. I do try to apply some common sense, however. If they are invasive, like thistle or wild violets, they need to go. (Although thistle has an automatic death sentence anyway, because anything that is out to cause me pain has to go!) Anything that is damaging to agricultural crops or the natural environments also has no place in the suburban garden, no matter how far away farms and natural areas seem to be. If you need to know which weeds are noxious in your area, check on your state's Extension Service and Department of Natural Resources websites and you will find lists of noxious weeds.


My last criteria for what gets to stay is simple: I only keep what is beautiful. While many wildflowers are beautiful in their natural environment, some do not hold up well in the garden, either because they don't flower prettily, their foliage is unattractive, or they are not bold enough to hold their own against the domesticated perennials planted around them. When something new shows up, though, I let it go and see how it does. I do not, however, ever take plants or their seeds out of the wild and transplant them into my garden (and neither should you). I let nature decide what to put in my garden and then I decide what to do from there.


As much as I enjoy native plants, I do not believe that true wildflowers are anything that you can solely base a landscape on. Meadows, yes. Suburban landscapes, no. At best most wildflowers only serve as accents to domesticated plants. Wildflowers have minds of their own and will insist on growing where they choose, and not necessarily where you want them to, and most do not transplant well. They also do not, generally, have very long bloom times, and many are small and kind of, well, weedy looking. Still, if I cannot readily identify a seedling, I will let it grow until I know what it is, and then make the decision on whether to keep it or not. By letting wild plants reach maturity (either by design or because I hadn't gotten around to weeding that year), I have made a few fortuitous discoveries. For instance, I have discovered that curly dock looks beautiful when it has gone to seed and looks great in dried arrangements. I have also had a yellow goatsbeard plant blooming in my front flower bed for weeks. Its yellow blooms looked great next to the blue geranium it chose to grow next to.

It is a balancing act, though, because even if you decide to let a plant reach maturity and flower, you need to take care of it before it goes to seed. Anything that you allow to go to seed will be back many times over next year. It's far easier to get rid of one plant this year than it is to get rid of dozens next year.

So, I am watching the weather closely, because it looks like it's going to keep raining for the next few days. Whenever there is a break in the rain I wait for the plants to dry off and get out there and weed. It will take a lot of attention on my part, but the silver-lining is that it is much easier to pull a plant out of wet ground than it is out of dry. It's always good to count those blessings.

Where to begin?

Confession #1: I want a beautiful garden. I want the kind of garden that you see on HGTV or the pages of Better Homes and Gardens magazine. This is not a new wish. Before we bought our house ten years ago, when we lived in a rental and didn't have any money because we were paying off student loans and saving up for the house's down payment, I used to send myself to sleep by imagining that I was giving Adrian Bloom and a camera crew a tour of my garden - a garden so beautiful and verdant that they were delighted to profile it on the Victory Garden. I would speak modestly and humbly in my designer gardening togs, and, of course, I would know the Latin names of all the plants, and they would thank me for sharing my beautiful garden.

Then we bought our house. It's an ordinary suburban split-level with an ordinary-sized yard (for Minnesota, I don't what size the yards are where you live), and I found out what kind of gardener I really am. It turns out I am a dreamer, a planner, and an information gatherer. I am not, it seems, much of a doer. There have been a few projects attempted, and some of them were completed (there is a vegetable garden and some planting beds were installed in the front yard), but there are several projects that I have been intending to get to for the last ten years which are still either unstarted or, worse, unfinished, and none of my garden has the kind of beauty I long for.

After years of HGTV, garden magazines, and The Victory Garden, I do have a vision of what I want my garden to be, complete with garden 'rooms', herb and vegetable gardens, and little benches scattered about on which to sit and watch the birds and smell the roses. I want a pergola for shade on sunny days, and I want a firepit for family and guests to sit around on cool autumn nights. The question is how to install these things between committee meetings, Boy Scout camps, and episodes of NCIS, which airs at least three times a day?

The obvious answer may be to hire professionals. The problem with that leads me to Confession #2: I am cheap. I am unwilling to pay someone to do something I could very well do myself if only I weren't so lazy and/or addicted to NCIS. (I can't help it, Michael Weatherly is just so cute!) So what to do?

Here is my answer. I've just got to get off my butt and do it! And I need someone to make sure that I do. That's where you come in. You are going to keep me honest and keep me working. Just knowing that you are out there (even if at first you're just in my imagination) will keep me going. I hope.

Let me assure you that this is not going to be a one-way street. In return for your vigilance, I will offer you what knowledge and information I gain from my quest. The information will be gleaned from twenty years worth of magazine clippings and my own notes. (Did I mention I'm an information gatherer?) As I share the knowledge that comes from my experiences, hopefully you will be able to learn from my mistakes and my victories.

So what do you say? Do we have a deal? Please, join me on my quest for a beautiful garden. I can't wait to see what happens!