The West Chicago Garden Club

The weather cleared up and was very pleasant for the June meeting at the Kruse garden.  Members strolled through the garden, John the tool sharpener was very busy honing our garden tools, and Tracy made three beautiful floral arrangements.

July in the Kruse garden is a month to be enjoyed.  Though we do weeding, dead-heading, watering, planting is mostly finished, moving plants can wait for September.  This is the time to admire our results. And the colors are beautiful.  It is the month for daylilies, zinnias, daisies, many cone flowers.  The hydrangeas are blooming.  We take longer breaks, our work is more relaxed, we view color combinations and possible improvements, look for monarch butterflies on the milkweed.  We saw a humming bird.  If a Wednesday is missed due to rain, there is usually no great urgency for a make-up date.

Since I have all this space to write in and I have taken care of what we are doing at the garden now, I would like to tell you about a gardening book I have been reading, a few pages at a time–The Year at Great Dixter’ by Christopher Lloyd.  Great Dixter is a beautiful home and garden in England, the garden started by Lloyd’s parents than improved upon by Lloyd over many years.  It is visited by thousands of people yearly.  Lloyd has been dead for ten years and the garden is maintained now by other landscapers.  The book is a yearly journal of what he planted, wants to plant, and how his garden is doing.  Even if I don’t know many of the plants, trees, and shrubs he talks about, it is fun to read—especially that everything he tries is not always successful, some plantings fail, some look awful.  He includes a few recipes—I am going to try making his elderberry cordial.

I have gleaned a few interesting planting ideas from some of the pages that I’ve read.  For instance I absolutely love oriental poppies, but I plant only a few because after the blooms, the foliage is large and lasts a long time in a sorry browning state.  Now Lloyd says he cuts the foliage to the ground after blooming.  Of course I immediately got my clippers and clipped my two down to the ground.  Then I looked at the bare spot and wondered if my garden has the same conditions as his—will my poppies come back?  He plants his poppies with bearded iris and particularly loves the orange ones.  I like the orange poppies too—old standbys, remembered from grandmother’s garden, so vibrant in the sun.    There is one that I particularly admired in the catalogues called Patty’s Plum—a large one having a real purple color.  Wouldn’t it look striking with a yellow bearded iris?  And then be able to cut the poppy to the ground after bloom?  When our garden club took the Cantigny tour, I noticed a beautiful Siberian iris—Pink Haze—featured in one of the garden rooms.  It would also look wonderful with a purple poppy.

Lloyd has a great liking for Verbena bonariensis, which is also a great favorite of mine.  He plants it with variegated grasses, which I think might work well at the Kruse garden—we have the Japanese variegated silver grass.  The verbena around it might give a wonderful effect.  He uses many plants that we all probably have in our gardens but he uses them in many very interesting ways.  And I have to admit it is perversely pleasant sometimes to read how miserable the weather is in some months at Great Dixter and how drafty and cold that huge house can be.

“A Year at Great Dixter” are monthly musings from a true gardener, Christopher Lloyd, his joy at the beauty of plants, his honest opinion on care and thoughts on trees, shrubs and everything in between.  -Angie

Gardening …….GAME ON !!!

We are “in the game” for the season and loving it!  It’s true that we get a late start at the Kruse House Garden since we are preoccupied with Plant Sale preparations most of April, but we jumped in and attacked those weeds full force in May!   Wednesday mornings at 9am we always start out with a quick assessment of the place, deciding on a game plan, then off we go.  Angie, Billie, Tom and Kerry have gleefully greeted additional volunteers Linda Fischer, Sandy Nicholson and Keith Letsche.  The additional help makes a huge difference!  Not everyone can make it every time but there is always more work than volunteers, so seriously think about joining us when you can.  Maybe you only want to work twice a month or once a month.  We welcome you whenever you can come.  Pack a few tools and show up at the garden, 527 Main Street, West Chicago, at 9am on Wednesdays whenever you can.  Together we will create a beautiful garden!

We are getting company!  The Winfield GC is having their June 7 meeting in the Kruse Garden.  We love to share the Garden so this is a good thing!  We also want it to “show well” so we are working with purpose toward that deadline.  It seems like more mulch is always a “go to” when prepping a garden for special occasions.  Marion Martin gave us a $100 gift certificate to Homer Industries, and we ordered some nice mulch.  Bagged mulch is much easier to transport to tortuous locations but it never goes far, so we are doing it the hard way with pitchfork and wheelbarrow. Sure does look good when it’s spread!

Preparation for the Winfield GC visit on June 7 is really just practice for the bigger event on June 23. That is when we will be holding our monthly meeting at the garden. You are going to love the evening we have planned! First of all John Wills owner of John’s Sharpening Service will be set up at the garden to sharpen gardening tools. The GC will pay for the sharpening of one tool per member. In addition to all the excitement of tool sharpening we will have a second spectacular activity. Tracy Atkinson, floral designer will demonstrate how to use material from the garden to create beautiful arrangements. All of the design material will come from the Kruse Garden! How exciting is that?! Yes, you are encouraged to bring guests to this meeting. We love having company!

So, we will continue to beautify the Kruse Garden and we will be enjoying every minute of this labor of love. No time on the bench for us!

Since our Kruse garden is covered by snow and at rest till spring, I will give you my thoughts for my own garden in the coming year.

Many of us during these months are looking at garden catalogues and ordering plants for that wonderful garden we imagine will be ours in the coming summer. But think. Why aren’t garden catalogues sent out in the early fall when we would have more time to order, maybe place an order for gardening friends for Christmas? It’s because in the winter we’re rested from yard work, we are anxious for a flower. We don’t remember the unpruned shrubs, the straggly plants, the failed annuals. We don’t remember that we were too disinterested, tired, busy last August to water or weed. In winter we are at our weakest and the beautiful pictures in the catalogues and the plants soon to appear at the garden centers are luring us.

It’s time to get a grip. Remember last year, the plants we ordered from the catalogues. In spring they seemed to arrive too early, almost all at once, packaged well in tiny containers, very delicate looking, and usually half the size we expected. I planted mine here and there just to get them in the ground before they totally wilted away, having long forgotten where they were to go in that garden of mine.

So now I’ve put away the garden catalogues. I pulled out some great garden books and magazines. My favorite garden magazine is the “English Garden”. It has beautiful pictures of many perennial garden borders that are very doable. To me “a picture is worth a thousand words.” This magazine is one of six garden magazine subscriptions that our garden club buys for our library. Many of the plants featured are very familiar to us. The gardens are planted in a way that I try to emulate, though not often with success. So this year I am not ordering plants now. Instead I have a list of five things that I will do that I know will make gardening less labor intensive for me and give me a fairly presentable garden. These are also the five points that make the gardens in the magazine so lovely.

No. 1 Remove All Debris

All debris should be removed as early as possible in the spring, hopefully in early April before the weeds sprout aggressively. All branches, old flower stalks, etc. should be cut down and raked up.

No. 2 Prune, Tidy, Mulch

Now is the time to look with a critical eye at my garden and be very brutal. I will prune those lopsided bushes, prune low-hanging tree branches that hit me in the head as I walk by. I will dig out those plants that never looked good—that straggly rose, the over-grown perennials, plants that looked messy, collapsed, those that need to be babied (who has the time,) plants that I hoped might recover and miraculously perform? Hope does not spring eternal in the NEAT garden. I will then mulch as much as possible. This part of the early work is the hardest, but done well, brings in later months the most satisfaction—a good appearance, healthy plants, and less weeds.

No.3 Edge the Beds

I will use a shovel to dig out a shallow ditch between the border and the lawn. This will give a very finished appearance. After this chore I will have time for a bit of relaxation because if I do nothing else the garden will already look very fine. It will be neat and tidy.

No. 4 Repetition of Perennials and Shrubs

A great garden will always have a repetition of plants. Look at the beautiful gardens and notice. I like perennials tightly planted so there is little room for weeds. Our gardens are usually not large enough to have too many varieties of plants. A few varieties in groups of three or more, repeated throughout the border work well. Too many varieties end up looking like a miss-mash with no cohesion or a place for the eye to rest. The garden has to flow. The same is true for the shrubs in a border.

No. 5 Buy Plants for the Location

A plant for sun needs sun. A dry location is not swampy after a rain. I probably do not need many new plants if I divide what I have and re-position others into a better location. To get the tightly planted look I will seed annuals directly into the open spaces. I like the annuals weaving in between perennials, providing summer color. Some annuals that do well seeded directly in the soil are zinnia, marigold, larkspur, California poppy, to name a few. I like cosmos between tall grasses.

These five points are my thoughts and plan that I will try to follow in 2016 to make my garden more care-free and looking put-together. My aim is to start early and be done by Memorial Day. I remember my mother on many a Memorial Day looking at the plants that I hadn’t as yet planted, so satisfied that her zinnias and old-fashion petunias were seeded weeks before. She would give me her best gardening advice: “Green is a color” and especially, “LESS IS MORE.”