Planning to Plant

Planning to Plant

People are amazed that I have gotten into gardening as I have. I do not find it so amazing, but rather somewhat predictable. While I have owned sixteen homes in my lifetime, three have been apartments in NYC (one with a large terrace that I planted and then replanted by my own design), nine have been vacation homes (two in the Hudson Valley, one in the Hamptons, five for skiing in Utah and one in Ithaca), one is a home where my son lives (I am only part owner), and three where I have lived full-time. The primary residence houses were my first two in Rockville Centre on Long Island and the third is the one I live in on this hilltop. Looked at that way, I would argue that only full-time residences with outdoor space or yards count for purposes of gardening. The vacation homes (the largest category by number) don’t really count because the nature of such a place is that you have other people taking care of them for you and you are an absentee owner. That does not lend itself to much gardening but even then, I had a hand in the landscape planting of six of them (two were condos and a third was so fully developed and set in the woods that there was nothing to garden). I built rock gardens, ponds, sand traps, berms and countless ornamental gardens even though I never lived in those more than a few weeks at a time. The full-time houses were always the subjects of a great deal of landscaping and planting, even if I had maintenance gardeners at all of them to some degree (as I did with the vacation homes).

What many people would be surprised to learn about me was that I spent two summers in college working on the grounds crew of the Cornell Plantations, now called The Cornell Botanic Gardens. The name was changed in 2016 ostensibly to better reflect the nature of the 4,000 acres of landscaping and gardens. During those two summers I worked most days for a shift and a half (12 hours), five days a week, for fifteen weeks each year and then perhaps eight weeks on either side of the summer for twenty hours per week on weekends and after class. That adds up to about 2,000 hours of hard physical outdoor labor all focused on cutting, pruning, weeding, planting and just plain old digging. I always liked the work. As every gardener knows, there is great pleasure to be had working with the soil and watching the product of your labors either in a neatly trimmed garden or a cleared section of landscape. There is part of most of our souls that is still connected to the land in one way or another. I don’t need to get too dramatic about it, so just say that I’ve always enjoyed my time gardening and while I am one of the lazier people you probably know, I never seem to mind going out to water the plants or plant them.

I have a designer’s heart and I’d like to think a designer’s mind and eye. I have remodeled many houses and condos in almost all of the sixteen homes I have owned and I have done many many landscape remodeling projects. So, to be honest, the only sense I can make of people’s amazement at my interest in gardening here on this hilltop must be a.) a function of my laziness and the incredulity at my willingness to get up and do anything physical, b.) the fact that I am now producing a blog and write a story religiously every day, which might mean that I write what is on my mind and gardening seems to get its share of airtime, or c.) that I just don’t seem like an eco-friendly, back-to-the-earth sort of guy. Any one of those three reasons is probably valid in and of itself, and I suspect that all three of them have significant elements of truth to them.

Recently, in a nod to my lack of sufficient knowledge about how to best interact with my rather complicated garden, I stumbled on a for-hire horticulturalist, who billed himself as the only such provider in San Diego. He took great pride in being unbound by the need to upsell landscaping services ranging from design services to plant matter purchases. I booked him for his four-hour minimum advisory session (not cheap, but not excessive for hopefully valuable expertise) and dutifully spent the four hours walking the property and getting his advice on everything from the amount of water needed for certain plants and the state of health of two trees I planted that are worrying me for one reason or another. Half the people who heard that I had hired a horticulturalist were surprised that I had done so (I guess it is not a normal thing). I then asked him to come back later in the week for a few hours to talk to my irrigation guy. He agreed and then on that day, surprised me by explaining that his fee was once again based on a four hour minimum (at the same price, which suddenly felt pricey for just two hours of his time). One of the things we had agreed he would do that visit was to give me a plan for redoing the patio area, something he suggested.

After several days without hearing from him I asked about the plan. The next day he sent me a phone photo of his clipboard with a very rough sketched plan for the area with four or five plant names. He also advised me that the drawing would be at added cost and was not part of his shortened site visit. I challenged him on that by asking if he thought that was fair? That was the last I heard from him, even after I asked for his address to send him the added money he requested for the vastly subpar plan. It is now clear that I have been fired by the only for-fire horticulturalist in San Diego. In the meantime, with my free landscape planning app on my iPad, I created my own very professional-looking plan for the patio area with one overall drawing and three drill-down detailed drawings. I would say my plan has about 5% attributable to his ideas (using a dark fountain grass as a highlight) where the majority of the plan is of my own design with input from Kim, Handy Brad and Benito.

Yesterday I got 1.5 yards of amended (?) topsoil in a monster-bag, joining the six monster-bags of mulch awaiting distribution on the lower garden. Today I took delivery of 75 plants and went and bought another 40 to fill in once I had set out all the five-gallon planters. Handy Brad will pick up another seven plants tomorrow morning and we will be ready for Benito and Sebastian to do the planting on Sunday. Between now and then I expect to get a delivery of the rusted Cor-Ten six-inch edging that will lend an extraordinary touch to the bottle tree bed and the hillside bed. Everything is in place and the plan is at hand and due for completion on Sunday (other than the irrigation retrofit that occurs in a few weeks). Planning to plant is like planning to do anything, if you are inclined to be a planner, its the fun part, if you are not, its a chore. For me, the chore is completion, the planning is pure joy.