Technique

Someone on Metropolitan Avenue wired pony packs of impatiens to the railing of his stoop -- red ones on one side and white ones on the other. A week later he nested them in little cozies of aluminum foil. So far the impatiens are doing fine.

For almost 10 years I gardened in a community garden in the East Village. We gardened in 4 foot by 8 foot plots. In community gardens you see what happens when people have a lot of energy relative to the size of their projects. All kinds of radicalism and fussiness and magical thinking are directed at overstuffed plots. Roses, tomatoes, honey locusts, herbs and lavender grow cheek by jowl with houseplants set out for summer, rescued specimens brought in from the curb and pass-a-long plants from the ancestors.

We had a gardener who brought a thermos of boiling water to pour over a row of parsley seeds. There were people who pruned down to trunks and people who could hardly bring themselves the snip a yellowed leaf. There was a lady who enclosed her plot of vegetables in a palisade of sharpened sticks and a man who enclosed his in net covered frame that looked like a kennel. They were all, in their way, successful.

People want to learn gardening secrets. They want to dose their plants with elixirs and believe that some people have green thumbs. In fact most gardening wisdom is conventional and unsurprising. It’s in every book and all over the internet and when you think about it, it makes perfect sense. The “secret” usually is finding the wherewithal to do things properly at the right time of year.

Most garden plants, once their basic needs are met, are awfully accommodating. A lot of what gardeners do they do for themselves.

Wisteria

I can pretty easily forgo planting most of the species that appear on the invasive plant lists for our area. There are sore temptations, like the Tea Viburnum. And several garden stalwarts, like English Ivy, are frankly irreplaceable.

But forgoing Wisteria is a brutal challenge. No vine matches its combination of exuberance and refinement.

I went around with the illusion that only the Japanese Wisteria, Wisteria floribunda, was invasive. (I failed to read the fine print on the Invasive Plant Council of New York State’s list.) The Chinese Wisteria, I believed, was safe and almost as good: a little less elegant and a little less fragrant, but with bronzy new leaves that set off the flowers. I took this picture of Wisteria sinensis on Fire Island to show that we can keep our bearings with invasive plants without compromising our appetite for Wisteria.

Then I double checked and found that the Chinese Wisteria is equally invasive. This a real blow because the recommended substitute, the American Wisteria frutescens, doesn’t make the same gorgeous show. It’s a nice enough vine, but I’d have a hard time planting it without feeling compromised.

Over the years I’ve shilly-shallied a bit on the question of invasive plants. I’m outraged that my beloved Black Locust is on the list when its nativity is in question. I’ve wondered about the actual harm of growing invasive plants in gardens if they are already loose in the woods. And I’ve thought the whole issue is a little misplaced because there are no unspoiled native ecosystems left to defile.

But gradually I’ve become a fundamentalist on the question. Because of choices gardeners have made euonymus and barberry have crowded the native shrubs from our woods. It was an innocent mistake, but now we know better. There are vastly complicated environmental problems that we can only begin to solve, but the problem of invasive plants belongs to gardeners and we should own it.

BTW I use the invasive plant list provided by the Brooklyn Botanic Garden:

http://www.bbg.org/gar2/pestalerts/invasives/worst_nym.html