by Liz Smitten, Certified Master Gardener

I believe that among home gardeners there are three vastly different primary mentalities. First, there is the logical gardener who has a strong feeling for landscape design, and whose garden may be extremely varied, but always with a sense of pattern, rhythm, tension, and harmony. Second is the passionate gardener, who may enjoy other plants, but whose desire is really for a garden filled with old roses, or iris, or cacti, or whatever tugs (or jabs in the case of cactus) at the heartstrings. And last, is the needy (although some might say greedy is more to the point) gardener who may have some small element of logic and some small twinge of passion, but whose overwhelming feeling is that it is essential to have one of every plant, in case it disappears from the Earth, never to be found again. I confess to falling squarely in the third category, and no plot of land will ever be large enough to accommodate my needs, because every year new plants are discovered, new cultivars named, and new hybrids developed, and if I could, I would have them all.

Because I am older, retired, and garden on a small city lot, I am bound to some degree by the triple restrictions of lack of space for new plants, the physical efforts associated with gardening, and the costs to maintain a garden. So I have reached a point in my life where, on a chilly day with weather not fit for outdoors work, or in the middle of the afternoon in mid-summer when the temperature is 100 degrees and has not yet peaked, or when I am fatigued after a day’s work in my own garden or at the Arboretum, I plan dream gardens. And, not only do I confess to being a needy or greedy gardener, but also to having a measure of silliness, which seems to be getting stronger with age, so that many of these gardens could appeal equally to the child, the childlike and the childish. For most of my dream gardens are not those of the noted English gardeners, whether they planted in cottage gardens or grand estates; nor are they the formal gardens of the French, or the terraced hillside gardens of Tuscany, or the cloud gardens of the Japanese island chain. To understand my dream gardens, you must have an example: one of my recent schemes involved only having plants with animals in their names, and which could tell a story. Such a list might range from putting a fleabane (erigeron) in your elephant ear (alocasia), the lion tail (leonotis) lying down with the gentle lamb’s ear (stachys), the race between the turtlehead (chelone) and the harebell (campanula), the skies raining catmint (nepeta) and dogwood (cornus), the foxglove (digitalis) raiding the henbit house (the latter a weed, in case you are reading this carefully with an eye to creating such a garden), to a family discussion about the bird-of-paradise (strelitzia) and the bee balm (monarda), or the snapdragon (antirrhinum) who guarded the magic cauldron in which was brewing a Halloween concoction made from spider lily (lycoris), toadflax (linaria, bat-face heather (cuphea) and wormwood (artemisia.)

Of course there are many other plants with animal names where I haven’t been able to identify a story or fable, so feel free to add to my list if you can. I am particularly interested in being able to include the owl and the pussycat, but so far only have pussy toes (antennaria) and catnip (nepeta.) But I suspect that, in a nutshell, is the life of a gardener – there’s never an owl around when one is wanted!