Gardening : Plants That Penalize Our Impatience

In my garden you hear a lot of “it wasn’t supposed to grow that big,” a lament all too common, I suspect. In my grandfather’s day (he was a landscape architect), plants were spaced far apart and it took years for them to grow together. There was a lot of empty space between the circles that represented plants on his plans.

That is one reason old gardens--especially estate gardens--often look more majestic than modern gardens. Plants weren’t crowded and could grow to their natural size, without unnatural pruning. Trees could become monumental in size because enough room was allowed. Shrubs could grow to tree proportions, providing an elegant and dense green backdrop for the rest of the garden.

In this impatient age, we plant everything too close together because we want a garden to look finished within a reasonable time (next week is not too soon). Trees get crowded and have to be taken out way before their time. Shrubs grow together so they become more like a hedge and need constant pruning. Most of us don’t even know what some of the most common shrubs really look like, because they’re never given the room to assume their natural shape.

I don’t think we modern gardeners are completely to blame. Circumstances do force us to keep moving on and few of us can expect to spend more than five or 10 years in one place, yet that’s what it takes for a plant to reach a reasonable size.

Because ours is a noisy and busy society, privacy is cherished, and to make a garden private requires the close planting of things that grow big fast. In fact, much of what we plant grows big and fast, and it is a rule of nature that very few things that are fast are long-lived or have much grace.

Landscape designers have a way around this. Plant twice what you will eventually need and then when they have grown and begin to touch, take out every other one. Don’t wait too long or they will begin to shade each other and lose lower leaves and branches. When you take out the temporary plants, you will again have holes in your scheme but now the remaining plants can continue to grow and fill in, without becoming crowded.

There is also this thing called patience. Sometimes, for the sake of privacy, a fence or wall would be a better choice, with slower-growing shrubs or trees in front of it. Some of the best trees and shrubs are slow growing, and there is nothing to do but wait.

There is something to be said for a little air between plants too. They tend to look better, they get more sun on their lower branches and they’re healthier because good air circulation is important to plants.

Also there’s the problem of knowing just how large something will become. When a garden book says “grows to 6 or 10 feet,” figure on 10. Because I am always trying to fit a few more plants into the garden, I go for the lower number, but it often gets to that size in just a year or two.

The description of the ordinary Pittosporum tobira in the Sunset Western Garden Book shows how vague the published size of a plant can be: “Broad, dense shrub or small tree, 6-15 feet tall, rarely 30 feet.” Before I learned better, I would have given it the 6 feet, but what if it had grown to 30?

So it would seem that plants that grow too big are a part of modern gardening, but there’s some help on the way. Nurseries are busy developing and introducing smaller, more compact plants, from annuals to trees, but especially shrubs. A good example is a new dwarf variegated Pittosporum tobira , named Turner’s Variegated Dwarf.

Here is a shrub always planted in too small a space. Most people give the regular variegated pittosporum about 6 feet in which to grow, because at least one garden book say it grows to “about 5 feet high and as broad,” but mine got that tall and wide in two years. In one garden, I saw it about 8 feet tall and a good 15 feet across--it took up most of the back yard. Let’s hope Turner’s Variegated Dwarf is a lot smaller.

Sometimes plants grow larger than their advertised height. A perfect example is how I spent my last weekend.

I had planted some of the new All-America Shasta daisies, the one named Snow Lady. They were supposed to grow to 1 foot, but they soared to 3 feet, even 4 feet in some spots. By the time they were this tall, they were ready to bloom so I left them in, but they grew even taller and then flopped over.

Because these perennials were only supposed to grow a foot tall, they were well up front in the flower bed; when they fell over, they took several neighbor plants with them. Out they came, along with a number of other perennials and even one small shrub that had been shaded out by this too-big plant.

Plants that grow bigger than the space I have allowed them have caused me a lot of work, and each time I take something out, I have to start all over again in that spot, but I’m learning. I now look up the size of each plant and then write the size on the plant label, where it stares me right in the face, so I can’t ignore it at planting time. I also get out a tape measure now and see if it will really fit.

I still cheat some, but I’m getting better, and a little more patient.