David’s Hill

It wasn’t a bad summer, really… but I was too distracted to realise it. Hot, bright days with late thunderstorms, cicadas in the pecans, soft fragrances sifting through the garden, calling even when I didn’t respond. I almost noticed that it was an old kind of summer - a summer from my childhood.

I just needed a break. A break from work and a break from responsibility. I needed to get clear, get focused, get inspired. Get away.

We’ve spent the summer waiting for a slow-moving bureaucracy to approve our plans for opening our new nursery in Grant Park… GardenHood is what we’ll call it. The city finally gave the go-ahead almost in time for us to open by fall. Its a good thing that fall is a long, gradual process in the South.

It turns out that waiting is my least favorite game. I’d never have been a good sailor’s wife.

In the work arena, there was a lot of it, but small projects and alot of conflict with client’s over expectations and very little real money, when all was tallied. Designing gardens has gotten much harder over the last years. People have forgotten what a garden is, what it costs, how its made. The big growers have trickled out and the small one’s are clinging to the ledge. If you want good plants to make a good garden, you really have to grow them yourself.

So that’s what we’ve been doing!

In the nursery, Elliott Dinsmore has made thousands of cuttings - most of which are now viable, smart little plants - expanding our repertoire to include many wonderful woody shrubs, conifers, roses…

We’ve had an amazing success with cuttings and the season was kind to us and we were able to take propagation way into the last days of August.

We’ve also gotten very serious about growing plants from seed. This is really the best way to get a broad selection of good garden plants that are otherwise difficult to import from Europe. Our seeds have come from some great seed houses in Germany, Holland and England, and were collected from the mountains of Mexico, hidden valleys on Greek Islands, coastal ranges in South Africa and Argentina, homesteads in Kentucky…

Every package that arrived in the mail increased my wanderlust.

Eventually design work petered out and my crew, lonely for the summers of their own childhoods, returned to Mexico, to family and friends, old loves, reminiscences.

Change came to my own family, too this August as our brave Elliott entered kindergarten. He comes home terse and tired everyday and is still navigating the passageways from toddler to kid. If I loved him or Emma more, I’d explode.

So with kids in school, crew on vacation and no city permit, I gave myself many excuses to slip out for a week to collect a few more seeds - in England!

My friend Joanna was my editor when I used to do some writing and styling projects for Garden Design magazine. She and I had some fun and a few adventures while she was in that job… I always enjoyed her visits. She’s a quiet and very savvy critic of all things garden and style. This time, she toured me around and we got to see some of the best gardens and nurseries in England.

Petersham, in London’s Richmond neighborhood, was a gem of a place. Arguably the most expensive garden center in Britain, the displays were perfect and the plants were perfect and I came away packed with ideas and inspiration.

Derry Watkins, of Special Plants, was also a personal delight. I’d bought seeds from her over the last few years, but meeting her and touring her incredible garden was a real pleasure. As an expat, she retains her old American cheerfulness in a place where cheerfulness isn’t necessarily an attribute and she was generous with her time and her brownies, which were awful. I came away with an impressive pile of seeds that will, hopefully be made manifest as charming garden plants for our new garden center.

Joanna took me to Hidcote and Bury Court (a GREAT garden by Piet Ouldoff), through and around the Cotswolds, into Wales,  and to meet her parents in Gloustershire, who were kind and quiet and interesting people. We climbed the bell tour in the local village cathedral with her father, the town’s flag keeper, to take down the flag on the evening of St. Bartholemew’s day. Being high over the rolling and green English countryside was a sweet moment, and a unique opportunity for a brash American tourist.

Joanna and I spent a week in each other’s constant companionship, and she’s a real trouper. I imagine her in London during the air raids, perservering, trudging forward with grace in the face of overwhelming adversity. She seems to have weathered my visit - although, she admits to sleeping away the entire day after I left! Her last email mentions how quiet its been since I left… hmmm…

I wonder if our customers will sense the stories behind the plants we sell them in our little garden shop in Atlanta? I wonder if they’ll know that Scott, one of my partners, has traveled many times on plant hunting expeditions to far Asia and risked health and limb to forray deep into untrodden forests gathering plants that he imagines would be nice in an American garden?

I wonder if they’ll casually pass by a group of small figs that we’re growing, understanding that the cuttings came from old, old plants at our old Southern farmstead and are only now being made available for the first time, maybe in many generations - maybe ever?

I don’t know what our customers will think, but its my job to guess, I guess…

…and my guess is that some will come to our new nursery and be softly coaxed into almost remembering the sweet summers of their childhoods.

Our nursery will be open for local sales on Saturday Mornings 

through June 27th 

 9 am until 1 pm.

We are open on Fridays with a limited staff (no one to answer plant questions!) from 10 am until 2 pm.

We can be open by appointment on other weekdays… please call 404 635 9023 (and don’t call from your cell while you’re on I-20, as we don’t  have someone manning the phone!)

If the weather is rough, we might choose to save ourselves rather than sell plants… so if you go to www.weather.com and see big dark red blotches over South Dekalb County or see that there are watches, warnings and extreme histerias, you should probably choose another day to come out!

Here’s the directions - http://verygoodplants.com/page5.html

(oh, and please don’t bring your dog - our cat and peacocks don’t care for them)

I’m pleased to look around my nursery on these hot mornings and see the beautiful plants that we’ve nurtured all of these months full of flower, big and strong. When we had our first open day in the beginning of April, the plants of that season were small and just showing leaf. I found that I had to explain to my new customers that those plants were grown in a real nursery, out in the weather, where they would be fully acclimated to their new homes, in gardens.

I had to explain that the pots were full of roots and the plants would grow and grow.

So many people are used to buying plants that are at their peak and out of season - plants produced in big greenhouses for sale at big box stores. I wasn’t sure if anyone would any longer remember what real plants should look like in early April.

I was surprised to quickly learn something about my new customers.

Our early emails were sent out to everyone we knew and everyone on our personal email lists. One group that got that first email was the parent group from our preschool - the Grant Park Cooperative Preschool. Our kids go to the Cabbagetown campus.

We love our preschool. Our kids love their teachers, their friends. They thrive in this community of color and noise, of fun and learning.

We love the parents. I can’t imagine where in Atlanta one would find such a diverse mixture of interesting people - stay-at-home dads, super moms, artists, entrepreneurs, lawyers, doctors, black and white and brown. Tattoos and cool outfits and urban hippies. And they’ve folded us, these frumpy gay dads, easily into the batter.  We feel comfortable and accepted here and our kids are thriving.

On that early April day, when the gate swung open we waited. The first car to pull in carried a preschool family, then the next and next. The email got distributed deep into Grant Park, East Atlanta, Ormewood, Cabbagetown, Lakewood, Edgewood, Inman Park, Candler Park, Kirkwood, and Oakhurst. Most of these communities are south of I-20 and definitely south of Ponce.

We also sent word around the garden clubs and other plant organizations  and around the northern part of town - Buckhead, East Cobb, Sandy Springs.

Guess what?

Our south of 20 neighbors came to the farm each weekend, hauling in kids and strollers and lunch bags and hauling away oodles of plants!

They oooed and ahhhed over plants they’d only seen in catalogs or in magazines. They asked smart questions and identified goals for their gardens that we could help them meet. They tossed around botanical Latin and casually referred to cultivars as though they were family members.

The folks from the more “respectable” neighborhoods didn’t come.

The garden clubbers, with some notable exceptions, weren’t that interested in supporting a local business owned and run by someone they all know. I have done a thousand flower shows, spoken to a thousand garden clubs, donated time, plants and talent every time I’ve been asked. I’ve said yes many, many times to tours and lectures and whatever else these folks have asked me to do.

But, with the exception of the true plant nerds, most of the folks who came to the nursery were almost all from Grant Park and surrounding climes.

And they all have a real love and passable knowledge of gardening and plants.

I’ve noted for a while now that as I drive around the intown neighborhoods that I see some remarkable gardening going on. I see cool plants in East Atlanta, and smart designs in Grant Park. Cabbagetown has some of the funkiest and best cottage gardens anywhere. Inman Park has some great old and odd trees. As my travels take me north and into higher tax brackets, I start seeing more grass, more green bushes, fewer flowers, fewer gardens. The plant palette becomes staid and predictable and is kempt without reproach.

The south-side intown neighborhoods are filled with color and fun and the gardens are becoming more and more sophisticated as creative young people are maturing and gaining ground on which to garden. I see mail-order plants from far off places and chicken houses and veggies and arbors and parterres and fountains.

These folks read the magazines, buy the books, study style and learn about plants. They translate whatever else they know of art and aesthetics into gardening, and that is always where the rubber meets the road in the world of garden design. This is where trends are born and styles are developed. We should be paying attention to what is going on south of 20!

These folks would seem to be a dream demographic for any garden club, plant society, flower show, botanical garden or nursery. But largely they go untapped by those local institutions who prefer to stay safely on the northside. Most of the folks I know who garden in these southern neighborhoods don’t have any resources easily available to them and don’t know that many of them exist.

Maybe its time to change all of that.

Look for our new nursery, Gardenhood, to open on Boulevard between 20 and Memorial in the fall. You’ll hear more as plans solidify!

I loved sharing my farm and those sweet mornings with people that I now count among my friends. Thanks to everyone that came to visit. Kathy and I really enjoyed you and we lament the closing of our Saturday nursery.

This will be our last week for the season and probably our last altogether.

We’ll see you around the neighborhood!

This has been a lovely spring, cool, wet, lovely.

But spring is over.

The thermometer today is passing ninety. Passing ninety-five.

It sure is hot.

In the early morning I was startled awake by the deep pounding of thunder that rattled the windows and brought the dog in from her tuffet in the living room. The wet garden, at first light, was steaming and moldy and the promise of a sweltering day is undeniable.

In the nursery, the plants for summer have reached their potential, stretching and filling their pots and waiting for a home in the ground. (In a way, we’re all doing that aren’t we?)

Lately, I’ve heard some comments about it being past “planting time”.

I think there is a lot of misinformation out there about “planting time”.

If you’re a farmer with a big spread that has seed to sow for a planned harvest, then “planting time” is a viable concept. Not so much for the home gardener.

The nursery and horticulture industry has been working hard over the last century to devise ways to grow plants in such a way that they can be planted any time of the year.

Enter the plastic pot.

A plant in a pot has all of its root system intact. In the old days, a plant was grown in the field and then dug at the appropriate time of the year - usually while dormant. The success of field-grown plants was less than perfect, and much precaution was needed to ensure a new transplant’s survival.

Nowadays one can plant a full grown tree right out of a pot and into the ground in the middle of August without having to cancel the summer vacation to stay home and water.

“Planting time” is now all the time.

Of course there are exceptions.

Field-grown trees and shrubs that are still being produced the old-fashioned way should still be planted in the cooler weather, but I’ve come to know that grasses, ferns, most perennials and things that are more at home in the tropics need the heat of early summer to establish well and stake a solid claim in the garden before winter comes.

I’ve come to know these things because I’ve been gardening all my life and gardening professionally for twenty years.

Over the years I’ve learned all of the skills associated with gardening. I’ve learned to stake and prune, to transplant and train. I’ve learned all about compost and grit, mulch and fertilizer. I’ve learned to spray and drench, espalier and double-dig. I can till and rake and shovel, dibble, lime and weed. I can sheer and root-prune and water.

Its very important, as a gardener, to know how to do all of these things. The thing is, what surprises me most, is that in all of my years of gardening, I’ve learned that most of these skills should be called into action only occasionally, only when very necessary.

People love to make things complicated. We tear things down to see if we can, we build things to see if we can. We stick our prodding fingers into everything and fool ourselves into thinking that our mark makes everything better.

Silly humans!

The ground doesn’t need us. The air and the trees and the water that falls from the sky doesn’t need us.

The garden, while man-made, is still a thing of nature. A gardener that knows how to set a garden in motion and stand back is a good gardener. Like a parent that takes away the training wheels, we understand that it’s not up to us anymore.

Gardening, as a past time, cycles in and out of popularity, like anything. Each time it rolls back around, it is followed by a herd of “experts” to tell us how its done. Most of these folks are snake-oil salesmen and journalists who need to have something to write about every week, all year, forever.

They tell us to build raised beds and kill weeds with plastic and grow our tomatoes upside-down and to stuff the dirt around our houses with gourmet compost.

Silly humans.

None of this stuff is necessary. Please don’t buy small bags of 15 dollar compost. Please don’t plant your tomatoes in an upside-down bag. Please don’t purchase rubber mulch. If you want designer compost, try using cash. Its just as good for the plants as the other stuff and it costs about the same.

Here’s what I know about how to garden:

1. Know something about plants or follow the advice of someone who knows something about plants. Putting the right plant in the right spot is the BIG SECRET to gardening success. Pruning, watering, spraying and staking are eliminated when you choose the right plants for your garden.

2. Use a light touch and quit messing around with things. To accomplish this goal, one should;

       a.Water enough to get plants established and after that, only at critical times to ensure the garden’s survival. And be willing to let go of plants that can’t survive without a lot of help.

       b. The dirt under our feet is probably sufficient. A little compost goes a long way, too much mulch becomes a problem, and digging the soil all of the time is damaging to subterranean biological systems and is unnecessary.  If you have a new house, you may have to spend a lot of time and work on your soil. Everyone else shouldn’t.

       c. Don’t spray chemicals all of the time. Every now and then you may have to squirt something, and that’s okay. Most of the time, healthy plants can fend off enemies without our assistance.

Today my garden is growing and stretching from the heat and rain. Weeds are sprouting in the flower beds and there’s a swarm of some kind of flying insects out near the pavilion. The hydrangeas are spilling into the pathway and a clematis has taken over some flowering shrubs near the fountain.

What am I going to do about it?

Nothing.

Our nursery will be open for local sales on Saturday Mornings 

through June 27th 

 9 am until 1 pm.

We are open on Fridays with a limited staff (no one to answer plant questions!) from 10 am until 2 pm.

We can be open by appointment on other weekdays… please call 404 635 9023 (and don’t call from your cell while you’re on I-20, as we don’t  have someone manning the phone!)

If the weather is rough, we might choose to save ourselves rather than sell plants… so if you go to www.weather.com and see big dark red blotches over South Dekalb County or see that there are watches, warnings and extreme histerias, you should probably choose another day to come out!

Here’s the directions - http://verygoodplants.com/page5.html

(oh, and please don’t bring your dog - our cat and peacocks don’t care for them)

My garden was my passion.

A lovely acre under big trees in a bad neighborhood surrounding a rambling old, very old, house.

The garden was a series of English-style rooms, connected by straight paths of brick and slate. Here a room of golden foliaged grasses, there a room of deep red blossoms. A room of blue, a room of pink.

The hedges were tight and punctuated by clipped globes and spirals. The pond swam with goldfish and frogs, the fountain made a gentle splash that could be heard in the dining room when the house was quiet.

The woodland glade was casually planted with bulbs and ferns and billowing hydrangeas and was centered with a lichen-covered stone circle. Druid and dark and mysterious.

“It was the best of times…”

I thought love could build a garden. I grew to know that love can also pull one apart.

First there was the farm… an historic collection of old shacks and a house and a barn. Pasture and pond, woods and fields.

I saw borders where there were thickets. I saw flowers where there were weeds. I saw a nursery where there was nothing. I rolled up my sleeves. I retrieved my check book. I took a lover and betrayed the garden I’d been married to for so long.

Then there were the children. A baby boy came first. Unexpected. In crisis. Then a girl.

Late night feedings, doctor visits, maternity leave.

Bonding, love and duty.

And again, I reached for the checkbook.

By now the garden I’d known for so long became a stranger. I’d pass it by on my way to and from. I’d glance at it from the increasingly dirty windows and then turn away.

What extra time I had was devoted to the building of a new, big garden. A different garden then the one I already had made.

This new garden was many acres with sweeping views and big structures. There were billowing masses of plants, an acre of gravel-mulched rarities, a wet meadow, two new ponds, a food plot and acres of meandering lawns converted from pastureland.

The barn got rebuilt, the house got a coat of red paint, the garden shed was moved, the corncrib was too. The log cabin was struck by lightening and needed a new shake roof.

At home there was a crisis.

Someone horrible who confuses love and hate tried to take our baby girl away from us. We were in despair.

In the old garden the hedges had grown hairy, the stone walls had started to come apart, the ponds were overrun with wild irises and the fountain had stopped working.

Another crisis.

The heavens had turned to bone and the land followed suit. My business died in the drought and stayed dead solidly for two years. The money dried up, and the garden dried out.

And another crisis, the current one…

Three years have passed without much in the way of meaningful income. My reserves are depleted and no one is calling for new gardens. I have a big talent lying fallow.

“it was the worst of times.”

But what I do have is a lovely and large garden on old farmland, built largely in the throes of drought and through the challenges of change.

This project held me fast while the tempest raged outside.

My response to the lack of clients was to start a nursery.

And I’m proud of it. I’ve planted and divided and sewn hundreds of healthy, robust and gorgeous plants and I’ve cherished the time spent there in that quiet work.

And drought weary gardeners all over the city have made the short trek to gather in what I have sewn, showing me an open door into my future. I’m grateful to them.

At home, the children are also healthy and robust and I count every weed, every dead plant, every broken pot in my old garden as time spent loving them and knowing them and loving and knowing them in a new place.

The children cherish their time at the farm, where running happens and frogs happen and kites and swings happen and tomatoes and strawberries just fall into their mouths.

Interestingly enough, the old garden has found some grace in her maturity.

We sweep the paths and clip the hedges every so often. Lately we’ve pulled the weeds and cut out the dead.

The moss on the bricks has become lush and strikingly beautiful. The plants that thrive in neglect have muscled out the weak and shine in their dominance. The flowers of spring are effortless now. They don’t need my coaxing any longer.

It seems that I can love a lot of things, and people at one time. I’m glad to know this. I hope everyone gets to know this, eventually.

It is the best of times.

Its been a little frustrating to be at the nursery on a warm Saturday morning and look around at the 20,000 or so BEAUTIFUL plants that we are growing and find that the only thing missing is customers!

We’ve gotten the word out. Everywhere I go I run into folks who say “I really want to come out to your nursery, but I don’t have time, since its SO FAR away…”

How far is FAR, exactly?

Our little farm is in the southeast corner of Dekalb County. Perhaps you’ve heard of Dekalb County - that’s the one where they keep half of Atlanta and all of Decatur, and Dunwoody, and dozens of other well-populated communities. We happen to be in the last bit of our big urban county that is still rural.

Our mailing address is Lithonia, which worries people. We’ve heard comments about people not wanting to go to Lithonia because they perceive that as the ghetto. It’s not, but either way  we aren’t in, or even very close to, Lithonia.

Our nursery and farm is in Klondike community between Panola and Arabia mountains and in the vicinity of the Monastery of the Holy Spirit. This area was recently named a National Heritage Area by the United States Congress, one of only about fifty such designations in the country and only two in Georgia. Go to http://www.arabiaalliance.org/ for more information.

We have 18,000 acres of protected greenspace in our area, including old farmland, archeological sites and natural habitat.

The best part of that is Arabia mountain, which is just up the road from our farm. This expansive granite outcrop is magnificent in the spring and fall when the mostly locally indigenous plants come into flower. Right now, the showiest plant is Tradescantia - spiderwort - which grows in abundance in the cracks and crevices and pools on the rock. Even along Klondike road, the spiderwort is eye-catching, with its bold clumps of lance-shaped leaves and cheery bluish/purple flowers.

Arabia mountain is a secret gem and even native Atlantans have never heard of it. On a weekday, you can park your car in the empty parking lot and hike up the mountain in total solitude and have a day to yourself in this weird, rocky and beautiful landscape.

This mountain is actually a vast outcropping of exposed stone - and it is a desert! Right here in our backyards! A desert with dwarfed and gnarled trees, yuccas, agaves and cactuses - all native only to this place.

Several of our visitors this spring have saved a few minutes for a walk on the mountain and we’ve gotten rave reports. Everyone vows to return.

So how FAR is it anyway?

It takes me less than 20 minutes to get to the farm from my house in Lakewood. On I-20 its about 15 minutes from downtown Atlanta. From Buckhead, its about 35 minutes. From Decatur about 25. From Sandy Springs and Marietta, its 40 minutes and from Dunwoody, about 30.

Is that too far?

Is it too far to end up on a pretty country road with farmhouses with chickens in the yard, dairy barns and roadside wildflowers. Is it too far to drive along the edge of a vast granite dome and see rushing spring creeks tumble along the roadside? Is it too far to visit an eighteenth centry farm site with a big barn, a deep pond, rolling pastures and peacocks? Is it too far to stroll maturing gardens with hundreds of incredible flowering plants - the same plants we sell in our nursery?

Is it too far to support a local business?

Very Good Plants is a REAL nursery owned by an experienced and passionate garden designer who knows what plants do best in our gardens because of a 20 year commitment to growing beautiful gardens right here in Atlanta.

We’ve currently got about 250 varieties of flowering perennials for sale - none of which are locally available anywhere else and all are plants we’ve had experience with in the garden.

We even have a few spiderworts for sale - including one called ‘Mrs. Loewer’ that has lavender flowers, purple winter foliage and blooms all summer.

Try to find that one at Home Depot.

Hello Friends,

This sure has been a beautiful wet spring - its as though the last few years of drought never happened.

In the garden, the plants that languished and wilted through the last seasons are abundant and thriving now and those quiet little weed seeds that laid still in the dry soil have found their purpose!

This is the nature of nature and the nature of gardening - those unseen rhythms with which we gardeners try to commune.

Those rhythms keep us reacting and responding and they help to teach us a little more each season about the plants we grow, the soil we grow them in, the water we water them with and the extremes they’ll tolerate. If only humans were so resilient!

Along those lines, the pressures of a flat economy have kept garden design and installation flat as well and my little company is barely feeding my little family. Oddly though, perhaps because of the reassuring rains of this spring, I am unusually optimistic.

Having lived through the boom period of unbridled growth and expansion, I am looking forward to a more thoughtful and intentional approach to the way our communities grow and the way we grow our gardens.

A couple of years ago, money - a lot of it - was the most common compost that folks used to get a good garden. The big corporate nurseries, big box retailers and poorly trained landscape “professionals” didn’t bother to understand plants, where and how they grow, what they do, what they want. They didn’t bother to understand those things about gardeners either.

If you were a landscaper and wanted to plant a landscape, you simply had to squish a few big truckloads of cheap bushes and short-lived flowers from Florida into the pinestraw and collect a fat check and move on. The clients didn’t know any better… they’d either move before the garden matured or they’d have it all redone next year anyway. No big deal.

Well times have changed. Those landscapers are flipping burgers now, or working at golf courses, or getting their paralegal licenses.

Those few of us that have always been here, doing the good work of gardening,  speaking for the plants, preaching the merits of intentional design, begging folks to use water wisely or plant sustainably, helping people to SEE the world they live in - we’re still here.

Now is the time for us to shine, to finally get our voices heard and our philosophies adopted.

To that end, I’ve climbed a steep hill and opened a smart little nursery with good and beautiful plants for the garden. Plants that live here, thrive here and support sensible, sensitive and sensual designs.

Come out to the farm and shop our little nursery and let me help you see a world you could live in.

The war is won by the guy holding the flag.

This weekend, we welcome the local chapter of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers to the farm for their annual “We Survived Another Spring” picnic.

These are all folks who hold the flag.

Find one in your area at www.APLD.org  and hire him or her to help you live a better life.

Our nursery will be open for local sales on Saturday Mornings starting

March 28th through June 27th 

 9 am until 1 pm.

We are open on Fridays with a limited staff (no one to answer plant questions!) from 10 am until 2 pm.

We can be open by appointment on other weekdays… please call 404 635 9023 and don’t call from your cell while you’re on I-20, as we don’t always have someone in the nursery!

If the weather is rough, we might choose to save ourselves rather than sell plants… so if you go to www.weather.com and see big dark red blotches over South Dekalb County or see that there are watches, warnings and extreme histerias, you should probably choose another day to come out!

Here’s the directions - http://verygoodplants.com/page5.html

(oh, and please don’t bring your dog - our cat and peacocks don’t care for them)