I hardly visit my small garden without pruning shears of some kind in hand.  I don’t know the standard names for all of them; I just know some need to be tough and some need to be easy on the plants.  This morning and most mornings these days I use the ones I call snippers. They are good for deadheading and for threatening plants back into the footprint I allow them to occupy.

My sister calls me the impatient gardener, laughingly, because I’m always ridding the garden of shriveled leaves, dying flowers, wayward branches; you get the drift.  I realize that the real gardeners have the vapors when I talk about pruning at the ‘wrong time’; but I find that my plants love to be pruned. They always respond well, and maybe it is because I love them and it is important to me that they be healthy and lovely.  And yes, I have sacrificed annual blooms for the sake of a healthy plant.  That’s okay; they come back stronger and happier.

The garden behind my townhouse is tiny.  I fenced in the yard and promptly built raised beds all around.  Each year for the first several, I widened the beds farther into the grassy area, hoping to have many flowers, few grass blades.  It worked.  In the center of my tiny grassy spot I have an 8 foot tall maple tree in a pot.  I grew the tree from a twig, pruning it into what I call a Japanese shape, as it grew.  It is taller than me now, so I’ll need a different strategy going forward.  When it gets too big, I will donate it and start over.  I guess I’m fostering the tree.

I prune away branches growing inside and across other branches, in part for the health of the tree and in part to keep it from becoming a sail…thus tipping over, pot and all.  This tree came into my garden because I needed to shade part of the garden from the harsh afternoon sun.  So it does double duty: It is beautiful and gives me joy, and it shades the plants that used to suffer because there was no shade to protect them.

Because my little garden is tiny, I can keep it weeded and mulched, and it is easy to deadhead the flowers.  Nearly every square inch of space is occupied by a beautiful plant of some kind.  I had a hellebore binge, a conifer binge; I have irises, lilies, peonies, calla and canna lilies, asiatic lilies, ferns, roses, hostas, gardenias, geraniums, hydrangeas, elephant ears, bear breeches, alliums, vinca, verbena, cone flowers, begonias, to name just a few.  Yes, there are many more.  I plant petunias, pansies and vinca seasonally with the intention to have color all season long.  My conifers are dwarf or exceptionally slow growing, to save space.  And I use a lot of vertical space too, so I have pots on columns, on the ground, in plant stands.  I watched a young man with a garden smaller than mine, growing only green plants of different shades and textures and it was lovely.  That sent me off on another tangent I’m glad I explored.  I planted a cryptomeria during that phase, because of its texture.  

The thing is, you never learn all there is to know about gardening.  New hybrids come forth each year, changing everything you thought you knew, and creating excitement among us gardeners.  There’s a brand new boxwood this year, did you know?  Probably not available to mere mortals like me, but it will be all the rage, I’m sure.

The nice thing about gardening is that you go a long time before you age out of it.  The only hard part for me is lugging in all of the pots for winter.  I used to have no problems with that, but now, it’s a chore.  Has to be done, though, because the plants can’t move themselves and I want them to live out the winter on the enclosed porch.

This season I’ve planted Kentucky Wonder beans on my arbor, to entertwine with the honeysuckle already there.  I’ll be able to pick beans under the arbor, smelling sweet honeysuckle, in a couple of months and I can’t wait.  Squash adds nice foliage to a flower bed, too, and you have the benefit of a yummy vegetable along the way.  My sister says my beds are “Jurassic Park” beds because my plants leap out of the ground and vegetable plants go crazy.  It’s all about soil amendment, really.  Once you get it right, gardening is easy.  Most of the time.

A well tended garden adds value to your life and to your property.  Nothing looks sadder to me than a beautiful home left bare of plantings.  If you don’t know how to grow plants, my guess is that someone like me would love to landscape your home…you pay for the plants of course.  Because.  Gardeners are addicts. Don’t say I told you.

I’m Brenda.  I’m a real estate agent and I help folks buy and sell homes with my company, The Premier Advantage Realty.  You can find me online at http://www.thepremieradvantage.com.

Hope you will plant a flower today!