zuzu's blog: Big Changes

When I retired three years ago this month, I naively assumed that my garden would look better than ever because I would have more time to work on it. Unfortunately, my three years of retirement have coincided with a severe drought in California. I also didn't allow for the natural decline of strength and energy at retirement age or for my seriously diminished income, which precludes the hiring of garden helpers. In short, more time could not compensate for less energy, strength, money, and water.

One of my winter tasks therefore will be the unpleasant job of revising my plant list to reflect the change in status of hundreds of plants from "have" to "used to have." Many of my plants succumbed to the drought. Most of my tropical plants were given away because I just can't continue bringing dozens and dozens of large and heavy containers into the house for winter and moving them back outside in summer. The tropical hibiscuses and plumerias are gone. I'll keep the clivias and I might keep the mandevillas because I have only six that have to be brought inside (one's hardy enough to live outside in winter), but the other tropicals are too much trouble to keep moving in and out. Besides, they never grew to their full potential in containers and it was impossible to grow them in the ground.

The same lack of energy has consigned most of my alpine plants to oblivion. I had to dump trays of ice cubes on them in winter to keep them happy in zone 9, and it no longer seems worth the trouble, so I've given most of them away. Now that I have no help in the garden, I have to spend most of my time weeding, and there's little time left to coddle plants that shouldn't even be growing here. My zone-pushing days are over.

My plant list will also be affected by a project that should be coming up this fall. I have an easement along my back fence for a utility pipeline. The utility company is planning to replace an old natural gas pipe that runs the full length of the easement -- about 150 feet. The shady portion of the easement is taken up by dogwoods, weigelas, rhododendrons, azaleas, hydrangeas, kerrias, and a myriad of groundcover plants. The sunny portion is taken up mostly by roses -- at least 47 of them, and perhaps more if the easement is wider than expected. I'm going with the property map saying it's 3 feet wide, but my real estate documents say it's 6 feet wide. All of those plants will have to be removed. I'll move some of the smaller ones if I find spaces for them in the rest of the garden, but some are too big to move.

Anyway, for all of these reasons, 2016 will be a year of big changes in my garden. It's nothing new. Gardens aren't static. There have been big changes here before, mainly when one neighbor took down a long row of Monterey Pines and my shade plants suddenly were in full sun, when another neighbor allowed oak saplings to grow into massive trees that cast shade on my "full-sun" garden beds, and when I added rooms and decks onto the house and had to move all of the plants that had been growing in those spots.

So, the garden resolutions for 2016 are: 1) No more zone-pushing; 2) No more plants requiring too much extra care.

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