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.

About habitual tension, pruning roses, and the value of a neutral state.

 

This week in Grimsby, the forsythias are still in bloom.

It’s been another week of pruning shrubs,  especially roses. Over the last two weeks, I’ve been working on a large bed of carpet roses, which have matured over the past couple of years and were ready for their first deep structural prune. Carpet roses tend to really grow into each other, and there was a lot of squatting and hunching involved.

While pruning short shrubs that require you to hover above them, balance becomes not only useful, but essential. Even the slightest miscalculated action can create painful reminders for weeks to come.

Over the past few years, since beginning gardening full time, I’ve taken to starting my days with some brief yoga. Nothing complex. I tend to do a couple of sun salutations in the Ashtanga tradition, which warm up my back muscles and stretch out some of the larger leg muscles as well.

This yoga practice has helped me over the years to become more confident in balancing above thorny rose shrubs and other adversarial plant material.

However, over the years, a second, unexpected benefit has appeared. The steady returning to the same set of postures, and especially the beginning posture – equal standing, Tadasana, Samasthiti, whatever you want to call it – has taught me what that posture feels like. And that means that now, every time I drift away from that posture, for example, if I go swimming, rowing, or if I do a week of pruning roses hunched over, I notice that certain changes have occurred in my habitual tension patterns and muscular holding patterns.

In my morning yoga warm-ups following last week’s rose pruning, I noticed that my chest felt particularly tight. When I raised my arms above my head, they tended to be forward and ahead of my center line.

Realizing this, I thought about that rose pruning and what could have led to such a strong effect. The hunching over and the pruning seemed to have relied heavily on my back muscles, and perhaps because of the position of my body, often hunched over standing or on a kneeling pad, I may have neglected to engage my core and balance out the strain on my back muscles. Sometimes when you’re working, the habitual default is the easiest, whether or not it provides structural support.

Over the course of a couple of days, the repetition of the morning yoga warm-up allowed me to regain a more equal sense of balance in my body, bringing my hunched shoulders back behind my heart for support, strengthening my core while relaxing my overexerted back.

When I came back to the roses this week, as I started pruning, I immediately noticed what I had failed to notice before: a tendency to hunch forward and to rely on my back muscles to support my entire frame while working hunched. Through the small but repetitive work done over the course of the week, all it took was that bit of awareness to engage the core.

After a day of pruning roses, once again, I found that I had worked my back, but I felt less unbalanced, and my body required less work to rebalance.

You may not be a gardener full-time, or even part-time. You may do yoga, or you may not. This exploration is about neither of those things, although they do apply.

The idea here – yoga, even though it is a brief fifteen-minute warm-up in the morning – takes the place of a point of stability to return to, an exploration of balance. It could even be summarized by just the standing pose, equal standing, which is a simple, neutral posture from which you can observe what is going on.

When I stand in equal standing at the beginning and end of every warm-up session, which I have engaged with daily for years, I now have a neutral baseline to which I can compare my state. I know this week my hamstrings feel tighter, and another week my shoulders are more hunched than usual. I’m establishing what a neutral, balanced state feels like.

Having that balanced state is key. It allows me to respond to imbalances with a rebalancing action. It gives my awareness a context.

Yours may be something completely different, and it may even be a non-physical practice, such as reading, that allows you to gauge your state of mind. Or you may walk every day. The key is a small action repeated many times.

That becomes a baseline that allows you to not maintain balance at all times, but to notice quicker what feels out of balance, and to return to balance quicker and more easily than you would otherwise.

Finding your balance quickly after exertion will prevent habitual imbalances leading to health issues and injury over the long term. Also, clearing your mind by revisiting a familiar state can do the same for your ideas. In some ways, it’s similar to our four seasons of gardening, where during winter, I let ideas and gardens lie fallow so I can see them with fresh eyes the next spring. That cycle allows me to create balance on a large scale.

But on a small, day-to-day scale, equal standing is, will remain being, and will increase being invaluable.

About spring pruning, hydrangeas and taking a step back

Early spring, before woody plants leaf out, is a time for preparatory garden work.

Pruning woody shrubs, like hydrangeas, can seem daunting at first. Before beginning anything, take a step back and have a look. What is the shrub you’re looking to prune?

With your full shrub in sight, perhaps at a distance, take a moment to observe it. Is it old or young? Has it been pruned recently, or is it a tangled mass of years of undisturbed growth?

There is no need to rush in. Taking a moment, perhaps even with a cup of tea in hand. Simply seeing what the shrub tells you is a way to begin.

If nothing is obvious, that’s perfectly normal. Without knowing where you’re headed, you can still explore.

After considering the shrub, take your pruners and step closer. Even if nothing obvious comes to mind, first reduce the decisions you’ll have to make. The three Ds of pruning: dead, diseased, and damaged.

Dead branches can often be identified easily. Their bark is shriveled, they are paler than surrounding branches, and if gently bent, they snap with a hollow sound. If unsure, prune off an inch at the tip. If the core shows green, it may still be alive. If not, it is clearly dead. Remove it.

Is anything diseased? Obvious cankers, blemishes, or signs of fungal growth should be treated with care. If a branch is diseased, disinfect your shears after each cut to prevent spreading it.

Finally, remove any damaged branches. This includes obvious breaks from winter or ice, but also branches that rub or cross. Over time, these will damage each other. Removing future points of damage is just as important as addressing present ones.

What this achieves is a reduction in choices. With fewer decisions to make, you can begin to see more clearly.

Step back again. Pause. Have a look at what your shrub looks like now.

This time, consider not only the shrub, but its context. Where is it? What is it doing in the space? Is it near a walkway, or part of a larger composition at a distance?

This is where the fourth D takes shape: design.

The hydrangea I’m considering today is planted close to a walkway, one of two lining the path. Behind it is a garage, and over time it has grown into the facade. It has also begun to push into the walkway.

Here, the goal is a narrower shape, one that rises upward rather than outward. It needs to remain thin between the walkway and the garage.

At this stage, it helps to understand how the plant grows.

This is a hydrangea paniculata. It buds at intervals, often in groups of two or three buds evenly spaced around the stem. From each bud, a new branch may form, and the direction of the bud is the direction of growth.

Pruning above a two-bud node may give you two branches. Above a three-bud node, possibly three. These buds often alternate direction along the stem, allowing you to choose future branch direction; whether growth moves into the walkway or runs parallel to it.

Some branches have grown sideways. Others are strong and upright. The upright ones, often with three buds, will form the main structure of the shrub going forward. These become load-bearing, shaping the plant over time.

These may be cut differently; lower, at a more intentional structural branching point, than smaller, twiggy growth.

When pruning, cut close to the bud. Leaving a longer stub results in dieback, which can invite insects or disease. A clean, close cut helps maintain the plant’s health.

With secateurs or loppers, keep the blade side toward the part of the branch you are keeping. This allows for a cleaner cut.

These design decisions are less obvious than removing dead or damaged wood. It is normal to pause, to step back several times, and reconsider.

Each cut changes the shrub. It changes the context for the next cut.

These decisions cannot be undone easily. A branch does not simply grow back.
Sometimes, there is no clear answer.
Shaping a shrub takes time. Often, it is a process that unfolds over years.

When you’re done, take a step back. Have a look. Notice what remains, and what may come.

You cannot fully predict how the shrub will respond, or which branches it will favor. You can only make a considered guess.
And when the decisions feel heavy, it is fine to stop. Sometimes the next correct move is not another cut, but to leave, and come back the next day.

Next year, in early spring, you will return. You will stand back again, perhaps with a cup of tea in hand, and look.

About forsythias, roses and winter rest

 

This week in the Niagara region, something changed in the gardens. Bright yellow bushes adorn the streets; forsythias are in bloom.

For gardeners, forsythias are a reminder that it’s a good time to do certain garden tasks, such as pruning rose bushes.

For me, forsythia also signals that we’re moving away from preparatory garden work and into early spring. In other words, it’s the real end of the winter pause.

Winter was a time of rest not only for the gardens, but also for the gardener. A time to break away from routine, from being physically in the garden, into a time of separation, peace, and quiet.

That shift from winter to spring, from non-action to action, is a cyclical one. One that, over the years as a gardener, I’ve had the pleasure of getting to know.

Winter rest can take a few forms.

Sometimes, while I’m away from the gardens, I’m really away. I’m thinking of things that don’t grow and bloom. I’m distracted by perhaps Kusama’s Mirror Room. I am away from the garden physically, but also in mind.

However, sometimes in winter, I find myself thinking of gardens, remembering the past season, or dreaming of what could come next.

But whether I’m away from gardens and thinking about them or not, I am not working in the garden, and so I’m not affecting what grows there.

After a couple of months of time away, being able to be in a garden and change things shifts the mode completely.

Now I am in gardens.

Sometimes, while I’m pruning standard hydrangeas, I’m thinking about the garden and its shape for years to come. Sometimes, while I’m raking, I’m thinking of other things, such as a mirror rooms.

But something has changed.

Now I can affect the garden. Now I’m in spring.

When I come back to gardens in spring, the break has given me fresh eyes and a fresh mind. Something that seemed like a difficult problem at the end of the season in fall now has a clear solution. I may not have thought about it explicitly, but the pause away has given me a chance to look anew.

In garden work, this pause is forced. In winter, I can’t dig and plants don’t grow, and so there is no way I can garden.
However, other creative tasks don’t have this embedded rhythm. I’ve found it beneficial in gardening, but it is helpful in other disciplines to take a step back in one way or another.

In visual arts, a common technique is to look at your work through a mirror, or upside down, or to step away from it. You are not changing the work. You are changing your relationship to it.

When writing this blog post, I jotted down a few ideas earlier last week and came back to it after a few days to fine-tune to edit. The days away made clear what was essential and what could be trimmed.

Short pauses are important and helpful, and relatively approachable to implement. However, longer pauses, such as a full winter, are also helpful.

I’ve taken a few months off of a project and come back to it with a clearer look at what really worked and what needed changing. Some things only become obvious with time.

It can be a little daunting to leave a project, especially one that you’re invested in, for a long period of time. Questions arise. Will I come back to it? Will I still feel motivated? Will this pause prevent me from completing it, or understanding what I meant in the first place?

Taking a break is not easy, and it requires trust.

This trust is not something that appears overnight. But taking small pauses and seeing their benefits compounds over time can lead to knowing that if you take a larger break, you will still be there, and the insights gained will benefit the quality of the work.

Some things will have to be let go of, and some things will rise clearly to the surface. It’s all part of the process.

So here in Grimsby, forsythias are blooming. It’s time to prune the roses.
There is an old, scraggly rose bush that I’ve been wondering about. I planted this rose late last year and didn’t know which way to take it.

With fresh eyes, I can now see which parts are to be kept, and which parts are to be removed. What shape I want this rose to be, and how it might frame the window behind.

When we tend to our gardens, we make decisions based on a kind of assumed permanence. We plan and plant as if the systems we see will remain. Gardens change through the seasons, but in the long term, we often treat them as stable.

Each spring, the thaw forms a seasonal creek that runs from the Niagara Escarpment towards Lake Ontario. It passes through the back of a Grimsby garden and floods the area.

Many years ago, the garden owner decided to shape this creek and turn it from a vague flood zone into an actual small trenched riverbed. The riverbed twisted and turned, and ornamental boulders were placed along its curves to shape and alter its path. This allowed the water to linger and to sink deeper into the soil, following the meandering path.

Trees were planted along its banks so they could enjoy the additional water in springtime. As they matured, they grew thicker than neighboring trees.

Kids played in this garden, and as the trees grew, they played along the riverbanks, sending little made-up boats down the water.

Recently, on nearby land, construction was done that diverted this seasonal creek. It was dug in under a berm to limit and control its flow. Even on a wet spring like this year’s, it no longer visits the garden where it used to flow.

The trees are mature now, but the summers are hot, and the lack of seasonal water may become felt over time. Trees speak in years.

In Grimsby, the Niagara Escarpment to the south and Lake Ontario to the north create a large geographical frame that deeply affects the ecology of the region.

In the spring, Lake Ontario remains cold for a long time, which cools the surrounding area. Between the lake and the escarpment, cool air pools, mitigating early seasonal temperature swings. This protects early crops from blooming too early, easing vulnerability to later frosts.

In the fall, the reverse happens: the lake retains warmth, which pools up to the Niagara Escarpment and protects crops from an early frost.

This is ideal for fruit trees such as cherries and peaches, and is one of the reasons why the Niagara region is known for those crops.

These patterns are dependent on the framing geography of the area. If that geography were to be changed, it would alter the movement of air temperature.

For example, if airflow were interrupted by a tall wall on the lakeside, it would shelter the inland portion from the cooling effects of the lake in the spring and the warming effects of the lake in the fall. Sensitive crops such as cherries would be more susceptible to damage, and crops could fail more often. The delicate balance that allows orchards to thrive would be disrupted.

This could be the case with lakeside construction, which would affect inland farmland and expose tender fruit trees to earlier frost and greater temperature swings in the spring. Farming, a practice already made difficult by many factors, may cease to be sustainable altogether. For a region that has cherries, peaches and other tender fruit at the core of its identity, this change would be substantial.

Our gardens may seem small and self-encompassed. It can be difficult to see how actions outside of their boundaries may affect them.

But understanding their place in the larger ecosystem, and the changes happening in the greater geography, can bring our attention to the flow changes affecting the plantings inside our gardens.

However large these neighbouring changes may appear to us once we see their effect on our plantings, these changes are also happening within a much greater context.

The Niagara region, and the Niagara Escarpment itself, has been shaped over hundreds of millions of years. This is why we can find fossils in the escarpment: remnants of a prehistoric sea that once thrived in this area. Cherries would not be possible in the Niagara if sediments had not settled into the Escarpment, seas retreated, ice thawed and Lake Ontario formed.

Change on a large scale can be very slow, but it is inevitable.

Ultimately, our gardens are impermanent.
Whether we acknowledge that change or not, it will happen. Sometimes, it is too slow for human lifespans to see, sometimes it happens abruptly and we see its effects in years, or even months. But an awareness that change may come from beyond what we can predict can inform more resilient plant choices, or a wider palette that allows our gardens to reset and rebound as conditions shift.