Pots
If you're not in a hurry to leave after visiting my
azalea garden, we could wander over to the work area on the side,
littered with pots.
Not empty pots. Pots with azaleas, hosta and Japanese
Maples. Pots with potential. Ladies in waiting. Some are for the
future garden. Some don't make the cut because they're burdened with
unattractive flowers. Some don't grow well, or they have few flowers,
or they displease me (their master) for some inexplicable reason.
Those pots become giveaways to visitors, put on the plant exchange
table at club meetings, or exiled to Siberia (the far reaches of the
yard where the soil is poor and my hose doesn't extend.) They will
fend for themselves, surviving on the whim of the god of orphans.
While I haven't composted any, that is still a threat I hold over
their branches when they fail to justify themselves.
After four or five years, they are keepers or are
expelled. Keepers find a place in the garden, often replacing a plant
I found inferior. Then I've got to find a place for the original
owner of that plot. Musical chairs, played to the hum of mosquitoes.
Potted plants face an array of dangers. They are always
threatened with being tipped over by wandering critters. Looking for
acorns or mice, the wild ones can tear out the whole plant and leave
it gasping on the ground, roots exposed, hoping I'll notice and come
to the rescue. Plants dry out faster in the pot than if they were in
the ground. Being portable encourages moving them frequently,
sometimes cracking the plastic.
There are so many problems that one wonders why a
better system hasn't been invented. Some think a better system is to
take each plant out of the pot when it first comes home and plant it
immediately. Good idea, except space is limited for most of us and we
plant them really close together “temporarily.” Years later, the
survivors are a tangled mess, cheek-by-jowl, impossible to separate.
Yes, you've got me: I am speaking from personal experience.
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| Pots left in ground for years (not mine :) ) |
I've seen gardens where the holes at the bottom of pots
aren't for drainage but are escape routes for roots. Plants in pots
can be decades old and the size of trees. My pots are often watered
by submerging them in buckets of water, never getting to develop
those huge root systems. Of course, one must remember to take them
out of the buckets. Hmmm … yes, you've got me again: I am
speaking from personal experience.
Still, each year my plan is to give away many more pots
than I take in and shrink the collection, easing the problems of
watering in the summer droughts. And each year, people whose gardens
I visit give me a bunch more. And I can't say, “No.” They are
gifts. Of course, the same works in reverse, but I never seem to make
progress toward my goal of having just a few to evaluate and care
for.
I'm sure that when they carry me out the house
feet-first, a perfect plant will be waiting in vain for its master to
come, drop it out of its plastic prison and into happy decades of
life in a soft, moist bed, just outside the picture window. Will
there be a Rescue Plant organization, screeching to a halt, sirens
blasting, to save that doomed, perfect plant as I'm hauled away? I
would start that organization, but then I'd end up caring for other's
pots and there I'd be: watering even more and shrinking my collection
backwards.
