Spring training in the garden

Jill Severn

Mariners spring training is underway in Peoria, where the temperature is forecast to be a sunny 73 degrees on Saturday. Local gardeners’ spring training is off to a slower start; Saturday’s forecast is for a high of 48 degrees under cloudy skies.

Still, there’s a lot going on in local gardens in spite of frosty nights: the garlic is up, crocuses and snowdrops are blooming, peonies, columbine and many other perennials are peeking out of the ground, and roses are sporting new growth that signals “prune me now!”

But, as in baseball, a lot of spring training for gardeners takes place in our minds, not our gardens. As baseball legend Yogi Berra wisely noted, “Baseball is 90 percent mental; the other half is physical.” This time of year, the math is about the same for gardeners.

This mental spring training can be complex for those of us who go beyond vegetables to obsessions about the aesthetic concerns of flower color, form, mood and spirit. Our gardens are our living canvases, and our role models include the French impressionist Claude Monet, who spent 40 years equally devoted to gardening and painting what he grew. We will certainly never paint as he did. And though we may never equal his gardening achievements either, we can try.

This spring, I’ve been drawing inspiration from what the English call “herbaceous borders,” which are usually deep, long flowerbeds backed by shrubs and the occasional tree. My guru du jour is Alexandra, a gracious English woman who hosts a YouTube show called “The Middle-Sized Garden.”

She spends a lot of time touring the best English gardens and interviewing their head gardeners and designers – and heaven knows, there are a lot of them, because English people with money seem to employ hordes of horticulturists.

As you would expect, they are a varied and opinionated lot. Some obsess over colors; others over forms. One, for instance, insists that what matters most of having combinations of tall, spiky flowers, soft round ones, and smaller less distinct forms. He insists that the visual interest this creates makes color combinations irrelevant.

He is an outlier, though. There’s a much larger, livelier debate about whether color harmonies or contrasts are preferable, and how to artfully compose a flowerbed or border to achieve a specific aesthetic effect.

Doing so improves the beauty of the garden, the personal growth of the gardener, and the joy – sometimes the rapture – of all those who see a border in bloom.

That’s the best reason to watch Alexandra’s videos: they inspire higher ambitions and the means to achieve them. She shows a wide variety of gardens that provide a good look at the effects of delicate, winsome harmonies of pink, mauve and lavender, others with bold, rich golds, oranges and reds, and combinations of opposites on the color wheel such as blues and yellows.

Yellow, she notes, is a controversial color in the English garden world. Some people ban it (and often its cousin orange) as disruptive; others use only its palest examples. Still others champion yellow’s inclusion as light and lively.

White also comes in for close examination. The video features one garden with nearly all white flowers, inspired by the famous Vita Sackville West white garden intended to be viewed by moonlight. 

The other great value of just looking at a wide variety of flowering borders is the way some manage to look as spontaneous as a flowering mountain meadow, while others feature a more ordered abundance of color and form.

Another value of YouTube videos is the pause feature, which allows the viewer to stop and stare at especially delicious combinations of colors and plants for as long as we like, and then to move on to the next and examine it as closely. Watching her videos in this way is akin to a good art appreciation class.

But the highest and best value of this spring training video is its illustration of possibility of creating garden compositions as deeply affecting to the viewer as the world’s most revered paintings, including, of course, Monet’s.

There is an undeniably spiritual quality to all gardening, because it makes us partners with the forces of life and growth. But the cultivation of gardens purely for their beauty – a luxury affordable to anyone with even a small flowerbed, a few pots or a balcony – has the power to provide a bit of the pleasure, peace and harmony the world needs now.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com