There is still time and happiness.
As we all know, good flower gardens take time. Hours. Days. Weeks. Seasons. Years. Lives.
Add it up: Winter evenings bent over seed catalogs and garden magazines. Spring working the soil and planting. Summer weeding and watering, wandering and wondering. Autumn contemplating the results. What worked and what didn’t? Winter returns. More seed catalogs and garden magazines. Rinse and repeat.
Good flower gardening requires all that. And more. Ask any bride, or new gardener: Something old and something new, something borrowed and something blue. Maybe delphiniums, asters, columbine, bell flowers, lobelia and globe thistles.
But starting over – we moved to our new house and garden about a year ago – is a different matter. As one of the accompanying picture shows, our original, new-house January landscape was depressingly bare. And it only got that way after three guys spent most of two days hauling off weeds, vines, garbage, busted pieces of cement, and yes, of course, two claw-foot bathtubs. All that from an urban Jeffersonville environment carefully gardened for maybe 20 years, then totally ignored for three more. A thriving mess. I recently came across that January picture while scrolling back through time and place, and it just stuck with me, having given up about 50 years of gardening and gardens at our previous home – a necessary move – to begin over again.
With that!
Some of the old place came with us
I had replaced two rows of repetitive peonies last autumn and brought in a bunch of day lilies. Also moved in a few hydrangeas. A fine artist named Beige Price had painted a wonderful landscape mural – with house – as a new home for our Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. There was an established ginkgo tree – and thank God for that. And a couple skinny, poorly-placed magnolias. a few walking stones. But not much else a guy could hang a garden hat on.
Have I mentioned that original, grim backyard picture? I didn’t remember it being that bare.
My solution. I just went all landscape palette. Listened to my inner gardener, that nosy, noisy creature that doesn’t like January. I went color shopping, starting over again. It all began growing flower seeds indoors, the March Cure for January, ah, blues. Marigolds in all sorts of zany colors, zinnias in all sort of colors and sizes, purple-leafed dahlias with bright cardinal-red flowers coming.
But here’s the deal with dahlias
Once planted outside, it’s taken them a couple months to flower from seed. But then you can dig up their tubers and just plant them next spring, a much quicker flower process the second time around. And the third. Indeed, my newly-planted-seed dahlias are just now beginning to bloom in August, but what a needed show long after the day lilies have called it a season.
I’ve also been growing a lot of geraniums of many colors, all from nurseries and box stores. I’ve happily got them blooming in showy red, white, pink and coral along the sidewalk. The trick is place those flowers in six to eight hours of sunshine with feet moist and mulched. They just keep on giving until the first hard frost, carrying the color load as our perennials step up, then out.’
Progress progression
It all comes with the new garden.
As I shopped for plants this spring, all I cared about was size and color. I stuffed the taller growing plants well over into a sunny corner, including hibiscus – talk about color – and colocasia and alocasia, often commonly called “Elephant Ears.” They offering astounding, multi-hued leaves and shapes, enjoy moist soil in partial shade, and are about as far away from January as a plant can be. My lower growing plants went in front, the purple heucheras, lacy coleus and spring-flavored hellebores in the shade.
I thought I had inherited a thick crop of daisies from the previous gardener and that turned out to be true, their white flowers with gold centers pushing on and up in the mid-summer heat, and none the worse for wear.
By June and July, the new flowers had taken over, creating as fine a garden as we had ever grown, shouting at us through the back window, onto the back steps, get out here and check us out. We would find ourselves sitting in chairs on the back porch, beneath the gazebo, looking out across the decorated yard.
We had forgotten how much we had done – our flowers had done – until the recent day I was scrolling through old pictures and saw our back yard in January, lifeless and leafless, empty pots and bare limbs.
Your new garden looks great, Bob! Keep up the great work!
a new garden at 80…any advice on pacing yourself or are you in fabulous shape? I find aging to have serious impact on energy, heat tolerance, endurance and all those physical components that make gardening fun
All I can say is WOW!
As a lifelong gardener, I’ve re-committed at 80 here in the section of our lot I call “the little backyard”. 24 years ago I’d planted a good foundation of trees and shrubs, and let the rest go to hell, almost. The rest of the backyard, the”Way Back”, is mostly vegetables and fruit trees. Two years ago I added cannas, dahlias, climbing rose, cardoons. Now I wanted a green, lush, quiet space full of ferns and two chairs. Then my husband and I went to work in the fall of 2025. Dig dig, dig. We dumped the two compost bins, along with sacks of manure and plenty bone meal. Microhiazze for new things such as wiegela, calecanthus, (where is auto correct?) thalictrum, mossy groundcovers, dahlias. Now a year later, I got my wish for a shady, lush place to sit. Someone said, “Don’t just work in your garden, sit down with a magazine and a margeurita. I’m 80!
At 89 I totally enjoyed your article. My late wife, Ann, and I enjoyed our trips to spend Derby with our dear friend Lillian Marshall. I think I may have you met at her house on Saint James Court. I still peruse the catalogs though now bedridden and immobile. I continually quote Audrey Hepburn, “To plant a garden is the promise of tomorrow.”
Just amazing, Bob. Very inspirational. Gracias.
Dear Ranters: as a fellow 80 year old I’m also starting a new garden in Wisconsin. Alas, I could not bring any of the lovely 15 year old trees, shrubs and perennials from my previous started-from-scratch garden on Washington’s Olympic Peninsula. But a garden is also a gift to the future, so I will persevere.
Dear Bob, I cannot tell you how much your words make me smile. I remember seeing your new and empty space here and am delighted to see what you two have made it in such a short time! This is so encouraging. My grandmother, who lived to be 104, put out her own vegetable garden until the age of 101; surprised to see the garden, I said, “Grandma, did you do this yourself?” She replied, “Well, your Uncle Jerry did the roto-tilling.” That has been my inspiration to keep going for many years now; after reading this, I am all the more determined. Thank you for sharing your beautiful space and thoughts. May you have many happy years there.
Nicely done. The new garden is so bright and cheerful especially with the Snow white mural on the shed. Love it. Doesn’t matter how old you are, growing plants is a recipe for enjoyment and wonder.
This Rant plus the comments gives me some encouragement and hope. As for pacing theoretically at 80 or plus, one has at least established their own schedule to “work” by? I have a primary interest in all things “horse” so my second interest of gardening, plants,etc have always had to make do on my terms not theirs. That being said if one plant or volunteer (not what I consider a weed or invasive) wants to live on my watering & lack of regular (any) fertilizing schedule then I care for “it” a bit more. Therefore I have never been into growing vegetables or starting plants by seeds that require regular scheduled care. Heck I can’t even keep dahlia (that are one of my favorite flowers) tubers alive well let alone grow them from seed. I did move some plants from the farm last year when we moved and they are mostly surviving. I could rant about the rocky clay soil from only a county away from where we moved or some of the over growth ground covers but not appropripate in this comment. Since I am in Jim Valvano’s old country his quotes are one on my aspirations – just never give up. Thanks for all the enjoyable RANTS over the months.
I didn’t know that at the age of 84 I was going to have to start over one of my gardens. Well…plumbing issues with broken worn out sewer pipes led to the upheaval of most of my large front garden. The workers were gentile and kind to me but then they dug up the front garden bed to a depth of 15 ft. Sewer pipes were installed. Soil was pushed back . So much clay at the surface…so many perennials lost.I talked to my grand daughter-in-law the same day who has relatives in Columbia where there were the earth quakes.Her grand father was dug out. Her dad’s wife’s place of business was destroyed. Plus more….I decided that her concerns were more important than mine….
Beautiful, Bob. I feel we may be kindred spirits. My husband and I “right-sized” recently, so I have walked a similar path as you. Ours was a new build, and when I look back on the pictures from when the lot was bare I cannot help but be amazed at how much has happened since we got our keys in December ’24.
Hi Bob,
Great work. The place in Utica was beautiful, so I’m happy that you are still gardening (and writing about it). For me…the best thing about having a garden, is knowing there will always be something that needs doing.
I guess being only 74 makes me a whippersnapper.
This is wonderful and I wish you the best in managing your landscaping moving forward. You should be proud of yourself as this is great work! As an experienced landscaper, the only additional advice I would offer is to study your yard first, and then design around what it naturally provides. It’s an approach that counteracts “fighting your yard” with simply working with the property. If you encounter a persistent problem in your garden, just ask yourself if it could potentially serve another purpose. So in essence, instead of studying how to fix it, you pivot to asking why it keeps happening – and then troubleshooting from there. Feel free to reach out for any lawn care tips!