Little bastards. I’d done my homework – in a big, sick, OCD-way. All winter I’d read stacks of books on gardening – making sure I’d better know my way around the garden centre come spring time. Finally I could stray from impatiens… petunias… geraniums. I’d skulk around the plant nursery on a May long weekend: queen bee of plants.
In particular, I wanted to get better at container gardening. With our veggies packed off to our community garden plot, the balcony just had to be pretty. With grand schemes, we went. I skulked. We bought a dozen new babies & gently tucked them into the car. Then what?
They grew. Some more than others. You know how, when you adopt an animal, they check you won’t kill it through neglect & total ignorance? The business plan of a plant nursery depends on the very opposite. By July, I realized the assembly didn’t look good. Balcony containers looked messy & droopy; plants were indistinguishable as they flopped on to each other.
Growing on our balcony – 2011
- (Spring: Crocuses, daffodils & tulips)
- Trailing lobelia
- Parsley
- Snapdragons
- So many impatiens they were visible from space
- Basil
- Spanish love vine (in italics so you read it in a Penelope Cruz voice)
- Some orange filler thing with trumpet-shaped flowers
- Fivies
- Ornamental grasses – a very manly sounding plant
- Lavender (pathetic things grown from seed plus a baddie from the nursery)
- Sucky-ass coleus (3 kinds)
- 2 confused and lanky tomato plants
- Pineapple sage
- Sweet peas (no good)
- Honey-scented alyssum (very good)
- Scented geraniums (One “over-wintered” and barely hanging on, another bought at the nursery – grew 3 feet tall with 6″ leaves… not a single fucking flower)
- A hosta! (the first one we haven’t killed!)
- Various failures with Scottish and Irish moss (“Oops” says the English girl)
- Outstanding smash hits with 2 lily bulbs
- A too-tall and quite lanky Queen Victoria lobelia (pretty, but funny-looking on its own)
- Some reddish dock thing that Paolo liked – looked like a weed to me
- A bay plant
- Mint
- Accidentally seeded wild flower (pretty but way too tall)
- Marjoram that just kept coming – totally my new favourite herb
- Rosemary that totally, utterly bit the dust
- Petunias we gladly let die
- A half-dozen gladiola bulbs that never flowered
- A pink thing called “pink flirtation”
- Lettuces that attracted major aphids
- Potatoes
- A spotted dead nettle unimpressed with my attempts at over-wintering.
- A tree peony that wasn’t sure if it liked us or not
- And the world’s most disappointing blueberry bush (net total: zero blueberries).
That’s… 41 different types of plants. In about 10 pots. No wonder it was ugly – that’s an acid trip with leaves. I took very few photos of the accidental ugly baby balcony garden. Instead, here’s a gratuitous shot of Vancover in August. It’s not always gloom & doom:
This list was a surprise to me – no idea I’d gone so far overboard. “Shove it in, shove it in”… perhaps not the slogan of Successful Balcony Gardening. While I now know the name of at least 38 more plants… this year we’re having 1 fern & that’s it.
Hey, you want a s'more? Some more of what?
