I am dealing with the dilemma of (1) wanting a garden where everything grows (too?) well and (2) wanting to grow rare plants by having the "public and private rock gardens" I described a couple of years ago in an article in the NARGS Rock Garden Quarterly. The easy ones are on a quickly planted steep slope in the front of the lot, and the difficult ones are in my bulb house, tufa bed, or flat raised bed in the back of the lot, screened from public view by a mass of hybrid musk roses on a fence. Thus, the plants most likely to die can do so in decent privacy, viewed only by my gardening friends, who understand. Jane McGary Portland, Oregon, USA On 6/29/2017 5:54 AM, Jane Sargent wrote: > As for David Pilling´s no-care ecosystem (and who among us would tell > David Pilling how to garden,) lazy and untutored people like me plant > things that have flourished in the neighbors´ gardens, such as > bugbane, siberian iris, hemerocallis, hyacinthoides, peony, silene, > narcissus, and then stand back and get out of the way. The problem > with this method is that a pachypodium namaquensum (?sp) or a > Brunschweigia is never going to pop up in the middle of it. Most of us > want to grow the plants that enchant and intrigue us and not be > limited to those from any natural ecosystem or neighborhood garden. > This takes some doing, and of course we want to hover and watch the > results. Taken to an extreme, in Massachusetts this vigilance can > amount to running a beautiful intensive care unit for plants on life > support. I wish I had the time or the patience to do this. I´m just > the wrong person. > Things are quite different in my southern Mexican garden, where the > trick lies in keeping things from growing and the best gardening tool > is the machete. The Megaskepasma erythrochlamis is ten feet tall. > Jane Sargent > _______________________________________________ > pbs mailing list > pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net > http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/… _______________________________________________ pbs mailing list pbs@lists.pacificbulbsociety.net http://lists.pacificbulbsociety.net/cgi-bin/…