I hope next spring to begin the planting of a garden around our house in western Massachusetts and, given the size of the budget, I know two things for certain. Aside from the help I get from my wife and son, I'll be doing all the work myself: I can't afford any skilled labor and would rather not put up with unskilled labor. The second thing I know is that, with respect to plants, I'll be starting small. I'll be buying in bulk—I have a couple of acres to landscape—but to do that, I must content myself with seedlings or even seeds.
That's not bad. Patience is, I've come to believe, the most important virtue for a gardener. It's also rare these days. I include myself among the offenders. After so many years working with computers, I don't measure time in decades or generations as my grandparents did; I measure it in seconds. This means I prefer plants I can acquire already most of the way to maturity, in large plastic containers off the garden center shelf.
There are a couple of problems with that sort of landscaping. To begin with, plants—especially the woody ones, trees and shrubs—suffer far more trauma from transplanting as large specimens than they do if moved when still in the seedling stage, which translates into slowed growth. Transplanted seedling roots into its new home far more quickly, and will eventually overtake the specimen, ultimately producing a larger, more handsome plant.
Many large transplants never entirely recover from a move. They have invested their resources in taking maximum advantage of conditions in the nursery field; the conditions there have shaped the root and branching structure, and the relatively mature tree lacks the ability to makeover all of this. The seedling transplant, in contrast, grows up in partnership with your garden.
A more serious problem with impatient gardening is that it robs this craft of most of its pleasure. It may impress the neighbors—look what I can do with all my money! But instant landscaping is, for the practitioner, no more fun than microwave cuisine. You don't develop the partnership with nature and the sense of process that, for me at least, is gardening's most exciting aspect. I still get a thrill every time I spy a seed of my own planting poking its first, infant leaves up out of the soil. Dropping a large tree into place, by contrast, is like adopting a child fully grown. He or she may be a great kid, but they aren't yours except in name.
A few weeks ago, while I was in College Station, Texas, a young Marine recently returned from a second tour of duty in Iraq and now pursuing an undergraduate degree in history at Texas A&M University, dropped by to visit my host, one of the university's horticultural professors. He had brought a plastic sandwich bag containing half a dozen bur oak acorns that he had germinated. Starting an oak in this manner is the epitome off patience, but it makes sense with this species. Bur oaks (Quercus macrocarpa) grow well in Texas because their deep taproot allows the trees to draw on deep reservoirs of moisture during droughts. Because of this deep root structure, however, an established bur oak finds transplanting particularly traumatic, because so many major roots must be severed. The acorns in the bag, though, had no root system to be disturbed — I could just see the tip of a root and the nose of a pale shoot emerging from each nut. The young veteran had planted several of the germinating acorns in his own yard and had brought the rest to my friend to plant at his farm outside of town.
Will that Marine see his trees reach maturity? Quite possibly not; there are many uncertainties in this world. During his visit, he alluded to the difficulty of his time in Iraq, and I suspect that the tree planting was partly a form of self-administered therapy. With those acorns, that young man had done something uniquely positive, something that no one could accomplish with hurry-up, off-the-shelf gardening. He had brought a spark of new life into the world. I'll have him in mind as I start my own seedlings next spring.
To read more from Tom Christopher check out his blog on HouseandGarden.com
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