MÉLANIe'S GARDENS

About underlying structure, stability and body sustainability

At this point in May, around the May long weekend, a lot of the heavier garden work begins. Moving planters, shifting pots, lifting and carrying things that have sat all winter. Earlier this week, I was preparing some of the larger planters around the garden for the season ahead. Emptying old soil, refreshing them, moving them back into place.

This time of year, a lot of gardeners begin to feel it physically. Sometimes it is the shoulders. Sometimes the lower back. Sometimes numbness in the arms or stiffness in the hips. Gardening is physical work, often repetitive work, and over time small imbalances accumulate.

For me, part of preparing for the gardening season is returning to my yoga practice. Years ago, I began with simple sun salutations as a warm-up. At first, even that felt difficult. Over time, I slowly added more postures and movements. A little more one year. A little more the next.

What interested me was not flexibility, but awareness. Each posture taught me something about how my body worked together. At one point I realized I had been standing mostly toward the outsides of my feet. Learning to ground more evenly through my heels completely changed my forward bend. Later, I began to understand the relationship running through the second toe, through the knee, through the hip. Small adjustments changed everything.

Over time, the practice expanded into a longer warm-up before gardening work. Not because I was trying to become advanced at yoga, but because the movements helped me notice things before they became problems.

Eventually, after years of adding more and more postures, I found myself returning again to the simplest thing: standing.

Equal standing.

Not frozen standing, but balanced standing. Weight distributed evenly across the feet. Toes relaxed. Knees soft. Hips neither tucked nor pushed back. The spine lengthening upward while the feet continue downward into the ground.

Breathing there.

What surprised me was how much work was hidden inside what looked like almost nothing.

The shoulders settle. The ribs soften. The neck releases upward. The head balances more easily. The body begins stacking itself instead of fighting itself.

And once I began to understand that standing position more clearly, I started seeing it everywhere else. In bending. In lifting. In carrying soil. In pruning. In reaching forward into a shrub. Every movement depended on what came before it.

Many systems approach this differently. Yoga is only one approach among many. But the underlying experience seems broadly shared: understanding the structure underneath the movement allows the movement itself to become easier, steadier, more sustainable over time.

Around this same time every year, the Niagara Escarpment disappears beneath green growth. Through winter, you can clearly see the structure underneath: trunks, branches, the shape of the land itself. But by late May, the canopy fills in and the underlying structure becomes almost invisible.

Still, the canopy depends on it completely.
Lately I have been thinking that much of gardening work is like that. The visible motions: lifting, planting, pruning, carrying, depend on quieter structures underneath them. Often invisible ones.

Every morning, before gardening work, I now return to simple sun salutations again. Not because they are complicated, but because they remind me of the underlying relationships carrying everything else.

The summer canopy rests on winter structure. Movement rests on standing.

About spring cleanup, trying different things, and the right tool for the right job.

This past week, the escarpment has finally turned green.

Here in Grimsby, seeing the escarpment here is unavoidable. It spans the entire length of the town, and so when the green canopy appears, as it has this past week, it is a monumental change. It feels like a wall of dead brown suddenly became a wall of living green.

This spring has been cooler than average, and to protect some of the more delicate plants, I have found myself keeping last year’s foliage in the gardens until the last possible moment. However, I’m catching perennials growing taller and taller. And so this week has been one of tidying the last of the winter foliage.

In other words, it has been a week of rakes.

Not all rakes are made equal, so it may be useful here to have a quick look at the different styles that I ended up using this week.

I have a few rakes with me on hand at all times, and I ended up using all of them this week in different scenarios: a regular metal fan rake, a spring-loaded fan rake that allows me to apply more downward force, a collapsible rake that fans out from a closed position to various angles, and then the slightly different but ever-useful hard rake.

The regular fan rake has a head made of flat metal tines. Depending on the rake, the tines can either be squared at the bottom or arranged in a gentle semicircle. The shape makes a slight difference in terms of accessibility to hard-to-reach areas, like behind a patio or squaring up to a hard corner. I have one of each.

The spring-loaded rake is one where the head actually has a spring attached to it. The tines are a little more heavy-duty, and so this rake can take a bit more force than the regular one.

The collapsible rake is unusual in a few  ways. The tines are round instead of flat, and their angle at the bottom, where the tines touch the ground, is sharper than my regular fan rake. The head of the rake also collapses the tines onto the handle, allowing for easy storage, but also allowing for variability in the width of the rake head itself. The same rake can be made into a wide one with tines far apart, to rake between emerging perennials such as hostas. It can also be made very narrow, to reach small spaces behind hedges or between close plantings.

The hard rake is one often used to level gravel or mulch. I find it useful for getting the dead out of grasses, especially once they are cut back, for example with a Karl Foerster or a thick overgrown Miscanthus. You can really lean into it and easily get the dead out of their centers.

There are a few locations that dead leaves like hanging out.

One spot was a carpet of Blue Rug juniper hugging the ground. I found that for an initial clearing, the collapsible rake’s strong angled tines actually helped dig deep and loosen some of the decomposed foliage. However, it left a lot of residue which the round tines couldn’t grasp. I used the spring-loaded fan rake to apply some force and really loosen the leaves up further. There was still a little bit of surface residue remaining, and so I used my regular fan rake, whose tines are a little denser, to tidy up the surface layer of the juniper. I did a final pass through with a blower, which removed any remaining foliage.

Using three rakes for this job may seem excessive, and just a spring-loaded rake would have worked fine, but it is a good example of how different layers of foliage got loosened and how which rake affected the area.

The ground cover juniper is very tough and can take some raking, especially if you rake in the direction of its growth.

Around this time of year, when raking this late into spring and perennials are emerging, you will find there is plenty of dead foliage stuck between fragile emerging new growth. This is where the collapsible rake tends to really shine. I found it essential for raking between emerging hosta leaves, daylilies, and carpets of epimedium.

There are also spaces that are hard to reach and have delicate new growth wedged in between winter residue. These are places where rakes often cannot go because existing plant material is already in the way in the form of shrubby stems and the like.

For these areas, the best rake is often the hand.

This was the approach I took with bigleaf hydrangeas. They are a little sensitive to cold, so I have left a covering of leaves around their crowns to help shelter them from the lower temperatures we have been having. But now new growth is emerging from the base, and it is high time for these crowns to be free.

The best tool in this case is a careful and delicate hand that can loosen the foliage without pinching off the new growth. If left longer, the new growth turns a pale yellow, like forced endives or forced asparagus. Delicious, but not ideal for hydrangeas.
And so carefully loosening the foliage with my hand is the best way to go.

There are many rakes available in garden centers and hardware stores, each slightly different. Even the different varieties of a simple fan rake will give you an idea of the colors, materials, shapes, and sizes that tines and lengths of handles can have.

The key here is that not all rakes are made for the same purpose, and not all rakes have the same strengths and weaknesses.

My collapsible rake, essential for loosening leaves among growing hostas, has tines too thin to efficiently rake a lawn, and is too fragile to dethatch it. Likewise, a rake built for heavy pressure and lawn work would quickly damage emerging perennial growth.

As you are finishing up your own garden cleanups this year, don’t hesitate to try different rakes. Borrow one, borrow a few, or buy a couple and see what fits.

See what fits your garden, and see what fits you.

About spring flowering trees, energy and canons

It has been a spectacular week in Grimsby gardens.

After a few weeks of bulbs emerging and shrubs blossoming, the trees are now in bloom. Cherries, pears, serviceberries, magnolias, the air pink and white and fragrant.

Underneath that canopy, I’ve been tending to some more garden tidying. The rose bushes, the carpet roses I’ve been pruning the last couple of weeks, are finally being finished, along with some straggling hydrangeas and the last of the leaf cleanup.

There is a little urgency in the tasks ahead, because gardens don’t wait. Once the temperatures climb and the sunlight lengthens, plants will be racing to the sky.

While I’m working through these final tasks, I hear a gentle buzzing above. Pollinators, braving the cooler weather, are moving through the blossoms. There is life in the canopy in more ways than one.

Last week, I was pruning another set of rose bushes; old ones, planted more than fifty years ago, on one of Grimsby’s older cherry orchards. As I sorted through dead, diseased and damaged thorny branches, I was surrounded by endless rows of blossoming cherries. Enchanting. It got me thinking about the work at hand. If the work I do now, I do well, then in a few months, these rose bushes will bloom just like the cherry trees blooming above me now.

The cherry trees themselves are in a critical moment. If the temperatures drop too low, pollinators won’t be as active. If there is a frost, the blossoms may not hold. But if the temperature is just right, if all the pruning, the pest management, the quiet care of the past year has been done, then this moment will achieve its purpose.

Every bloom comes from past care. And each act of care sets up the next.

Throughout the gardening week, I realized I am surrounded by this. I am always gardening for something that will happen. Much of gardening blossoms later. My actions are on a time delay. But while I am creating future blossoms, I am also surrounded by what I have set up in the past.

In another garden this week, under a soon-to-bloom flowering dogwood, I removed an overgrown juniper to expose a mature mugo pine. This is part of preparing the garden for a larger change: a sod removal and an alpine planting to come. It is another instance of preparing for future blossoms. In this case, not just a single plant, but a new direction. Without this preparatory work, none of that would be possible.

And so I find myself in this moment, surrounded by the blossoming canopy of May trees while preparing what comes next.

This is not only true for gardening. There are many activities where actions taken now only bear fruit later. Often, one works for weeks, months, or years before seeing the result. Long projects can be overwhelming. Over time, uncertainty creeps in. Where am I going? What am I doing? Why go on?

As I work toward future results, I am also standing inside past ones.

There is something steadying about that. Something that softens the weight of what is still to come.

Gardening is a long-term endeavour, often without a clear end in sight. It is easy to get lost in the work, in the decisions, in the direction. But standing under a canopy in bloom, I am reminded that the work does come through. That care accumulates. That something will answer.

It can be a leap of faith. But gardening time is cyclical. There’s always a blooming canopy.