Ramblings from Rabbitbrush Ranch: Gardening should relieve stress, not cause it

Ramblings from Rabbitbrush Ranch

Gardening and appreciating the natural world in Northern Nevada

Ramblings from Rabbitbrush Ranch: Gardening should relieve stress, not cause it

Gardening should relieve stress, not cause it

I've just finished reading Gardening for a Lifetime: How to Garden Wiser as You Grow Older by Sydney Eddison.

As the title implies, it gives advice to aging gardeners who don't want to give up their gardens. It appealed to me because I've realized in the last few years I probably will be alive longer than I'll be able to do the yard work I do now. I even made a conscious effort at our old house to start replacing high maintenance areas with lower maintenance landscaping.

Here are the tips from the author that I'm planning to keep in mind as I plan the new landscape here. I think they are just as valuable for young, busy gardeners as they are for older gardeners:

English-style perennial borders are very high maintenance. You don't have to plant perennials every year, but you do have to remove dead leaves, deadhead the flowers, divide them every few years, stake some of them, and so on.
Keep the perennials that need the least work and give you the most pleasure.
Use shrubs instead of perennials, even though some do require annual pruning. Research them before you buy.
Work with the existing environment. Eddison wrote at great length about gardening next to and in Connecticut woodland. Here, I let rabbitbrush grow wherever it pops up in the rear part of the back yard.
Use mulch to control weeds and enrich the soil.
Plant in containers. Yes! It took me a long time to realize how much easier it is to take care of plants in pots. One of the best things is no weeds. I also like being able to rearrange them.
In a new garden, use lots of bulbs, ground covers, and shrubs and plant fewer perennials.

I'm ignoring some of her advice:

Hire help or recruit volunteers. The main reason I garden is I enjoy being outdoors when the weather is nice. Having other people do the work defeats the purpose. With that said, I do need and get help for the physically demanding tasks.
Don't be a perfectionist. Are you kidding? If I were a perfectionist in the garden I'd have given up soon after I started. Again, I just enjoy spending time with my flowers. The only time I realize how imperfect (sloppy) everything looks is when someone visits.
Turn your lawn into a meadow. Sorry, but meadows sound like a lot of work if you still want to keep weeds out of them.
Be willing to give up high maintenance mature plants such as overgrown hedges or old trees. I think I'm pretty practical when it comes to these. I'm hoping to get rid of a couple of cottonwood trees and and all the juniper bushes this fall or winter. (Did you know junipers are called "gasoline plants" because they burn so quickly?)

I would add one more piece of advice of my own:

Embrace tools, especially power tools. When I finally got around to buying a lightweight electric chainsaw, I was amazed at how much time and energy it saved me. I use an electric hedge trimmer to mow last year's ornamental grass and some perennials and weeds. I've tried a couple of different kinds of garden carts that have made yard work easier, too.

I found an ongoing theme of the book pretty amusing. Both the author and I love daylilies. I love them because they have pretty flowers, they bloom for a long time, their foliage looks good most of the time with little work, and they'll tolerate poor soil and irregular watering. She loves them as unique cultivars (and she has a hundred or so unique ones). She says they take all her time for the month of July and she spends 2 hours each evening snapping off all the day's blossoms (while they're still fresh) instead of waiting and deadheading them in the morning.

Whoa. One of the things I've always liked about daylilies is you don't have to deadhead them. I just cut off the stalks after all the flowers have bloomed. Clearly I'm way ahead of the author in the area of giving up perfectionism!