Small garden creativity at the Chelsea Flower Show

Visiting the annual Chelsea Flower Show at least once should be a must for every garden enthusiast. The big landscape gardens are terribly impressive, but the smaller gardens can be quite lovely, very creative, and totally appealing. Here's another small photo essay complements of Treehugger showing some of the small gardens featured this year. TPP has always admired moss in gardens, but here in the upper Midwest moss pretty quickly turns into toast. Enjoy.  

Tomato wilt watch

The wilt watch is not going well.  TPP started with 6 tomato plants, caged, in a row, and now three have been removed, and two of the remaining plants are wilting.  So after a good start, the tomato part of the garden is almost back to square one.  A few leftover plants at a local nursery have been potted using a potting mix, but you don't replace 5 foot tall plants with nearly full-sized fruits in just a week or two.  So you just try to salvage something.  Now the watch turns to peppers growing about 4 feet away from the tomatoes.  This is the problem of small gardens, especially when you routinely cheat on plant spacing.  A nice heavy rainfall could saturate the soil and facilitate movement of the wilt to the peppers.  If the wilt gets there, then the dominos will continue to fall, sadly.  Next year will require some major shifting of our gardening efforts to avoid growing nightshades in this general area.  This type of event is one of the major challenges of small gardens, and especially so since the last two years have not been good gardening years and while late, this year's garden was growing pretty well.  To add to the gardening woes, the 1st Japanese beetles have been spotted, a relatively new pest in these parts.  However their appearance is late, so maybe they didn't do so well and this years hatch will be small; so far cicadas are nearly a no show as well, not that they are a garden problem, but another insect that pupates under ground where the drought conditions of last summer and fall may have been difficult.

True gardeners are not deterred by lack of space

Never met a gardener who didn't try to squeeze in as many plants as their garden allowed, and at in places where garden space is truly at a premium, or just plain lacking, the intrepid gardener still manages to get some soil, stick some plants in it, and have a go. In this regard, nobody seems to challenge European gardeners who seem to be able to have plants sprout from the woodwork, but still there is a certain delight is seeing people make the most of a little. Up in the NW corner of Lincolnland there is a little old river town called Galena and parts of it are almost built on the vertical so what lot you may have is quite slanted. Yet gardeners prevail and plant, and the sag of this particular walkway connecting the third floor of a house to the street above shows that a few tomato plants and kitchen herbs are worth a certain risk of having the whole thing collapse onto your neighbor's deck below. You have to love the attitude.