Garden catalogs

As soon as the Christmas season is over and you've seen the last of gift catalogs for a short while, well, until they figure out what merchandise they have left to flog off on post-holiday sales, the first of the garden catalogs arrives!  Seeds, bulbs, and plants, and the Phactors peruse each one looking for things that might fill in this spot or grow in that spot.  This is a gardeners favorite winter-time activity, day-dreaming about new plants for our gardens.  A lot of corners get folded down, but ultimately, reason prevails, and you end up ordering some of those things.  As somewhat jaded gardeners, novel plants grab our attention, mostly because a lot of others have been tried and failed to deliver.  And of course these catalogs are largely pictorial promissory notes.  Look at what this is going to look like in your garden!  And so you dream of how good this will look.  In general bulbs have been the most reliable of catalog items to look the way the pictures say they will look.  Shrubs are another matter.  Now our azure beauty berry has been a great success growing in a very tough spot.  But some plants are famous, part of our pantheon of tremendous disappointments, some of which have been tried several times as our memories are dimmed by fabulous pictures indicating that somewhere at least once one of these plants looked this good.  One of our great disappointments has been weigelias; they just never look very good, wimpy bushes, wane flowers always duller and fewer than anticipated, and after a couple few years it gets the ho-hum yawn and yank.  But that's how it works, you fall for the promises every time. 

It's that time of year! Garden catalogs begin arriving

If you are a gardener, a plant-loving person of any type, you know what happens just after the Christmas mail rush: garden catalogs begin arriving! Yes, all those promissory pictures telling you that at some point in time under some particular set of circumstances where no expense was spared someone manage to photograph one of these plants is just that perfect condition. Your results might vary. Nonetheless, the Phactors love our garden catalogs. Mostly they give us ideas about what we might plant this year. For example, the garden adjacent to our patio needs an ornamental tree or shrub as a center piece, but it's not an easy place: part shade, a bit dry because of the dense sugar maple crown above, and a bit too exposed to wind from the NW (which describes way too much of our estate). Quite a bit of new landscape gardening is needed around the renovated pond. Let's see, refurbish two ancient, scraggy forsythia, or yank them out and plant a new Magnolia, maybe a yellow flowered one? OK, that's a no brainer. But this is what all those wonderful catalogs are all about - making a wish list, a type of wishful shopping, like people who wander malls with no particular intent of purchase, a mind set marketers try hard to change. Oh that we had a local nursery that carried such varied stock among which to wander, but most cater to the least common denominator. The arrival of garden catalogs means that in just 3 short, miserable, cold nasty months, a new gardening season begins, and so we imagine all those lovely things growing lushly from our dry, shady, hard, clay soil. So more than any other thing, these catalogs help us look forward to better things, a new round of phytotherapy. So how can the postal service be doing so badly if they have all these garden catalogs to deliver?