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Big Decisions

I am terrible at making decisions. I usually go back and forth when deciding something, hashing over all the options and postponing committing myself until the last possible moment.
I never was able to pick out dishes for our wedding registry. I remember feeling literally sick as we wandered through stores trying to decide. It would have committed me to a set of plates for the rest of my life, and I just couldn’t find any that met all my needs and desires.

Right now I’m faced with the difficult, decision-laden task of replanting a bed in front of our house. It’s that challenging space to the side of the front steps that juts up to the foundation. We recently took out some wildly overgrown euphorbia and a decades-old camellia that had been badly pruned (before my time!) into a large, dense ball of green. The huge rhododendron comes out next. I’ll have a pretty big area to work with and a very blank slate.

I’ve been thinking about planting a tree. I’d like a graceful, deciduous tree that stays narrow but is not columnar, and that won’t grow so wide that it bumps up against the house. I want it to stop growing at about 15 feet but to not quit short of 10, and to reach the height I want pretty quickly. Of course, it would be nice if the tree and surrounding plantings also conveyed that we are talented gardeners and an interesting household. Like those elusive dishes, a lot rides on what I choose.

Yet I haven’t found many good examples of trees or even shrubs planted next to houses that rise about six feet from the front walk as ours does. In fact, this space seems to be a problem for lots of in-city homeowners. In my Ballard neighborhood it’s more likely than not that you’ll see blobby shrubs that have been hacked to fit, or the occasional lopsided tree that hugs the front of the house.

Percentage wise, I bet a lot more pruning takes place in this zone than in other parts of the garden. It must be an area of particular interest to PlantAmnesty, a local nonprofit with the mission of ending “the senseless torture and mutilation of trees and shrubs.” In this issue, Wenda Reed introduces us to Cass Turnbull, a big name in Seattle gardening circles, who started the organization a little over 20 years ago.

I visited www.plantamnesty.org to get some help with my planting decisions, and under plant and pruning information I found all of Cass’s book, The Complete Guide to Landscape Design, Renovation and Maintenance. How cool is that! Reading it online instead of buying it felt a little bit like cheating, but in educating me about tree selection the online book is helping fulfill her organization’s mission. I learned that the “mature height,” listed on a tree’s nursery tag is about half of its “ultimate height” and that a quick growing tree or shrub will probably become huge. Now I will be much less likely to plant a tree that I’d end up torturing or mutilating to get it to fit my strict size requirements.

While on the site, I took PlantyAmnesty’s pop quiz on tree biology and got a lot of pruning tips and plant information including the sarcastic, but very useful “Six Ways to Kill Your Tree.” I also found seven possible solutions to my too-big rhododendron, so maybe it won’t have to come out after all.

With this help from PlantAmnesty I might just be ready to start making some planting choices. But then, maybe I’ll sit on it a little while and go to PlantAmnesty’s all-day Festival of Trees at Magnuson Park on Mother’s Day for some options. There’s no use hurrying. These are big decisions I have to make.

Happy May!

Marianne Scholl
Publisher and Cofounder

©May 2009 Caliope Publishing Company