My clematis vines are finicky. Some summers they are lush with blooms, other summers the flowers are sparser.
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Alan: We consider The Garden of Eden a place of "perfection" and therefore "changeless." But why do we ascribe immutability to The Paradisiacal Garden when real gardens are just the opposite? T.S. Eliot observed that "Humankind cannot bear very much reality." Perhaps mutability is Reality's least manageable quality and so we seek "to stop the world in order to get off." Although my personal identity is built on "the pursuit of truth," I increasingly wonder if "denial" and "self-chosen illusions" are, for most people (perhaps all) indispensable to psychological balance, even if the components of that balance are startlingly far out -- "to the right," "to the left," "to the celestial," "to the chthonic." For years I fact-checked the bogus political emails sent by conservative friend Georgie who, at last, astonished me by confessing: "I like being partially right." Lacking "the heroic virtue of a saint," perhaps the most important "thing" in this life is "the balancing pole itself," guiding us over the abyss no matter how "far out" the ends of that pole may be.
One Thing Is Constant in the Garden: Change
Drought, disease and insect pests can change how you yard looks from year to year. Here's how some expert gardeners contend with nature's fickle ways.
Bart Ziegler/The Wall Street Journal
If only gardening were more like home renovation. You redo your kitchen with new cabinets, appliances and flooring, and a year later it looks pretty much the same.
Things are different out in the yard. Just when you have the trees, shrubs and flowers artfully laid out, something goes wrong. A prominent tree dies. A shrub decides not to bloom. Drought turns things brown, insects attack or a storm sends a tree limb crashing into the peonies.
That's one reason why this year's garden never quite resembles last year's, and can look radically different from what you planted six or seven years ago.
The exceptionally cold weather this past winter, for instance, left its mark on my upstate New York yard. It killed rose bushes back to their roots, meaning they essentially had to start over this spring. The upshot: The bushes this summer are miniature versions of the 4-to-5-foot-high beauties of seasons past.
The gaping hole in my row of shrubs where two trees died. Bart Ziegler/The Wall Street Journal
More annoying, the harsh winter killed my two butterfly bushes completely, roots and all. One of them had stood about 10 feet tall. Combined with the death a year earlier of an adjacent Black Lace elderberry tree—thanks to sap-sucking aphids—there is now a big gap in the row of shrubs I planted to hide the parking area from my lawn.
Then there is the less-deadly serendipity that can drive gardeners crazy. Some summers the tomato plants bend to the ground laden with 1-pound fruits. Other years, you get barely enough tomatoes to make a salad, thanks to fungal infections or other blights.
On the other hand, the capriciousness of gardening can cut the other way. Several clematis vines by the side of my deck that often limp along with just a handful of flowers have been smothered in purple this summer.
What gives?
I asked some professional gardeners how they deal with nature's fickleness. Well-known public gardens have to contend with the same issues and, unlike my yard, have to always look pretty for ticket-paying crowds. Of course, they have staffs, budgets and, often, greenhouses full of replacement plants that make repair efforts far easier.
My oakleaf hydrangeas are unpredictable. One year they barely bloom, the next they create mounds of flowers. Bart Ziegler/The Wall Street Journal
A few years ago, Chanticleer, a Wayne, Pa., garden known for its unusual combinations of blooms and leaf shapes, lost a 75-year-old fernleaf beech, leaving a major hole. "It was a magnificent tree," said Bill Thomas, Chanticleer's executive director and head gardener.
Fortunately, two branches of the big tree had touched the ground through the years and rooted themselves, a process that horticulturists called layering. After removing the dead beech "we kept them [the rooted branches] to become future trees," Mr. Thomas said. Meantime, the garden staff planted a fast-growing Yoshino cherry tree nearby and added perennial flowers to help fill in the empty space.
"We always have extra plants on hand," he said, adding, "We assume by the time the two layered beeches are big enough to compete with the cherry, the cherry will be declining due to age."
At Wave Hill, a public garden perched above the Hudson River in New York's Bronx section, "every garden season there are many small natural disasters," said Louis Bauer, the director of horticulture.
In a newly renovated bed this spring, "two of the five viburnum shrubs we planted never leafed out," Mr. Bauer said. After the long winter, the garden staff thought the shrubs were simply delayed in pushing out new growth, "so it was well into the busy time of spring when they were pronounced dead," he said.
To fill in the holes created by the expired viburnums, Wave Hill planted extra perennials that it already had planned to put in that bed. This fall, Mr. Bauer said he will add another viburnum and reposition one of the three survivors to even out the display.
Wave Hill also lost several of its giant copper beech trees over the past few years. While the demise of these decades-old features of the garden was mourned, their death brought opportunity, Mr. Bauer said.
Not only did the removal of the trees open up new vistas across the Hudson, "we have added diversity to the gardens by replacing some with other kinds of trees, like red maple, cucumber magnolia and disease-resistant elm," he said.
So how should homeowners deal with the vagaries of nature?
"Change is one of the constants in the garden, and if you like to garden, this is one of its secret joys also," Mr. Bauer said. "There is always some kind of adjusting going on."
Chanticleer's Mr. Thomas offered a more philosophical approach.
"Being a gardener is somewhat like a long-running Zen experience," he said. "We try to control things, but we have to accept what happens."
What havoc has nature wrought in your yard? Join our discussion in the comments section.
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