The Travails Of A Garden Catalog Addict

It’s time to take a serious look at the new plant and seed catalogs for 2015 and the new plants and seeds that will tempt, tease and amaze you. There seems to be more than a sprinkling of “what’s old is new” in this year’s offerings, and while I usually don’t shout “how high?” when these vendors tell me to jump, I must confess that within hours of receiving the Plant Delights catalog online I had already placed my first order. What was on that order? Maybe later.The old but new theme was pointed out in Amos Pettingill’s front page remarks in the White Flower Farm’s spring 2015 garden book, where he notes that their “new” offering of the world-renowned Blackmore and Langdon delphiniums has a little of the old and a little of the new. B&L delphiniums date back to the early 20th century, and I can remember seeing my first majestic B&Ls at the Chelsea Flower Show in the 1970s—and they were breathtaking. If roses are the queens of the garden, the B&L delphiniums are truly the kings. With flowers of strikingly pure colors on plants that were 7 feet tall, and taller, they made me marvel at the horticultural genes of the Brits.

But while WFF seems to have discovered in this catalog that there are actually gardeners and gardens in our big cities, on one of the opening pages they feature a picture of Asclepias “Gay Butterflies.” Great, I thought, WFF is getting on the monarch butterfly bandwagon, and any help here is appreciated. Keep in mind that this plant is critical to the survival of this single butterfly and its reproductive process. But there’s not a single mention of this, only a small note: “An important food source for butterflies.” Wow, what a missed opportunity. What were they thinking? Or not thinking. How about “A critical plant for the survival of the nearly extinct monarch butterfly”?

But it gets worse. On the very next page there’s a picture of a monarch on a liatris—one of a hundred plants that the monarch might feed on in passing, but, unlike the Asclepias, not at all critical to its survival. What a missed opportunity. Has to make one wonder what Amos is thinking these days. Or is he?

After a very busy gardening season last year and having my upstate garden on a tour that promised no more than 20 visitors and turned out to be more than 100, I thought I’d take it easy in 2015. I was going to restrain myself, limit my spending and thus my planting. It would be a year for reorganizing and rethinking my perennial beds and slowing things down a bit.

But I’m an addict, and with no chapter of Gardeners Anonymous around, I’m afraid that even before I got on the wagon, I fell off.

It really began last summer when I realized that I’d started a note on my iPhone simply titled “more plants.” So as I worked in the garden I would find a spot here, a spot there, an idea here and an idea there, and in no time I had the beginnings of my 2015 plant wish list. It was always there—first on my iPhone, then it popped up on my laptop and my desktop computer. The reminder was omnipresent, and the forces of the addiction and need to plant were simply irresistible. It didn’t help when Bluestone Perennials and Klehm’s Song Sparrow Nursery sent me emails offering discounts on gift certificates for the holidays. I mean, how in the world could I resist giving these to myself?

Ah, but it got worse. Only days later, an email from Plant Delights Nursery announced that their catalog was soon going to be mailed—but in the meantime I could always see the new 2015 catalog online. I was weak. It was cold, it was dreary and I needed my fix of roots, crowns, plants and, yes, dirt. OK, I could control myself. The online catalog has a little box that you can tick next to each tempting plant saying “wish list,” and that’s pretty safe, so I began checking the boxes. And then as I got to the end and I had made my first round of wishes, a little voice that’s part of this whole addiction thing started to whisper in my ear, “But what if they sell out?”

The whisper got louder and I began to tremble. I was trying to be good. “But what if they sell out?” I was remembering how exhausted I was at the end of last May—how my back ached, my wrists hurt, the rabbits laughed and the deer lurked, the endless days of no rain, the Japanese beetles—and the next thing I knew I had totally lost control. Without my realizing it, there were numbers in the “quantity” boxes, and the “add to cart” button seemed to be getting hit as I was overwhelmed by a force that had completely taken me over. Once again, I’d lost control. In spite of months of therapy, rebuilt self-esteem, credit card balances going down instead of up … the 2015 gardening season had begun, and I was once again a slave to the garden. Yippee. Counting the days till spring.

But oh no, it didn’t stop there. Addictions never do. Days later the Klehm’s catalog came, and just when I thought I had one of everything in my garden, Klehm’s had done its best to let me know that the end was nowhere in sight. But it got worse—much, much worse. The Wayside garden catalog arrived. Years ago this was one of the most exciting and looked-forward-to catalogs of the new year, but more recently it had become little more than an embarrassment from a once grand and then fallen horticultural legend. I’d placed a small order a couple of years ago and the plants I got were horrid and the customer service likewise.

But under new management have they turned the tide? This year’s offerings are oooh sooo tempting. Can the addict resist?

And today the Roots and Rhizomes catalog arrived. I’d had a similar experience with them several years ago, though they didn’t have the stellar reputation that Wayside once had. But you know how addictions go. I was just going to open the catalog and take a peek. There were pages and pages of daylily offerings, but not being a Hemerocallis fan I felt safe. That was until I hit the general perennial listings, and then the cravings set in and hit me hard. First one page got a Post-it and a circle, then another and another. I needed a fix bad and unfortunately that little gardener in my head reminded me that a few of the plants on my wish list were in last year’s Roots and Rhizomes catalog.

It’s only the middle of January, and I need to get to a meeting of Gardeners Anonymous pronto. So far I’ve placed only one small order. But I feel the urge, the almost uncontrollable need, the insatiable lust for just one more plant. Well maybe two. Well ….Keep growing.