By Steve Chamberlain
Contributing Writer
Now that the summer solstice is past, I think it’s time to take a final look at the winners and losers in the garden over the past winter and weird spring. Note that I am taking the desirability for gardeners as the reference point in populating the two categories.
Winners for the weeding gardener include two big ones. The all green version of Snow on the Mountain (Aegopodium Podagrari), also known as Bishop’s Weed or Goutweed, has been a continuing nightmare. In my garden, we call it the green menace. The variegated garden plant is sterile, but once it reverts to its wild, all-green form it becomes the “Green Menace” and propagated both by underground runners and seeds. This season the remaining plants hiding where they are not wanted seem much fewer and they were slow to begin to spread. Moreover very few bloomed. Prompt attention to weeding out what we found brings us closer to the formerly unobtainable goal of eliminating this menace from the garden — clearly a winner. The other weeder’s winner is (Houttuynia Cordata). This is a variegated Japanese native plant with beautiful red streaks in the leaves. It is also an invasive nightmare. Normally, I do a severe weeding over the 4th of July and then again in the fall. This season, almost none are in evidence and those that are present only have three or four leaves. Clearly neither Goutweed nor Houttuynia prospered over the past winter and spring. Hurrah! By the way, I’ve not seen any slugs at all yet this season.
Other winners are desirable plants that seem to be prospering. These include hellebores, hostas, all kinds of ferns, Solomon’s seals, tradescantia, obedient plant, bleeding heart, all kinds of alliums, astilbe and camassia to name a few.
Most of the losers in my garden are shrubs and trees. Cultivars of both species of Japanese maples (Acer Japonicum and Acer Palmatum) were more or less beaten down. I lost most of my dwarf cut-leaf Japanese maples. Some of the larger cultivars fared better, but even the more cold-hardy Acer Japonicum varieties lost some tips and branches more than expected. Purple- and gold-leafed Japanese barberry (Berberis Thunbergii) seemed to lose from a few too many branches, especially the dwarf varieties. Asian magnolias of various kinds survived, but bloomed less profusely or not at all, except for the late-blooming Oyama magnolia (Magnolia Sieboldii). The same thing was true of flowering crabapples. Some varieties had a very limited floral display. My river birch (Betula nigra) species and cultivars are happy, but two rarely-grown oriental birch species with lovely peeling bark are now even more rarely grown in my garden. All of my tree peonies seem to have been unhappy. Some lost branches and none of them bloomed with the normal profusion. I lost most of my largest climbing hydrangea (Hydrangea anomala ‘petiolaris’) although after severe pruning, I think it will survive and re-grow. My Lady in Red (Magnolia Macrophylla) died back to the ground for the first time, although it’s regrowing vigorously. The other various hydrangea cultivars seem perfectly happy.
I did notice that all of my native plants seemed unfazed by the weather. Apparently things like this have happened repeatedly over evolutionary time and they are ready for it. In general, it was some of the Asian cultivars that got bent out of shape.
In trying to unravel what exactly about this past winter and spring was so deleterious to some of my favorite garden plants and shrubs, I’ve come to the tentative conclusion it was a perfect storm. Some didn’t like the one really cold snap with no snow cover. Some didn’t like the early warm spell followed by several days of hard freezes. Some may have been attacked by specific pests that did better over last winter. The effects are cumulative and make for a complicated result.
One thing may be true. The progressively difficult effects of climate change/global warming predicted by horticultural scientists may have begun. Things more subtle than more tornadoes, a 1,000-year flood, prolonged drought and the like may be at work. Once I recover from losing things I thought were “forever,” I should begin to introduce new kinds of plants into the garden to broaden the palette of things I have in the Earth.
