Garden in the City: Say My Name! I Would If I Could

LINCOLN SQUARE -- Bovary? Aretha? Mulva?

Alright already, I confess, I don't know the names of at least half my plants.

It makes for some awkward conversations when I talk to them. "Looking good there, guy," Icompliment the thing with the yellow flowers. "How's the weather treating you, chief?" I ask theother thing with the other yellow flowers.

The thing with the yellow flowers. [All photos DNAinfo/Patty Wetli]

I am not, for the record, completely clueless.

There's a small palette of annuals I recognize on sight -- impatiens, caladium, coleus. I've beenbuying them for ages, which means we get reintroduced to each other every year, though I've nevermanaged to keep begonias and geraniums straight.

Your greatest hits of perennials -- hostas, lilacs and coneflowers -- are also more or less no-brainers.Beyond that, I'm out of my depth.

Hey, I know you. You're coneflowers.

I have a new plant this year, the name of which was immediately familiar to me when I spotted it atthe garden center -- "Huh, that's what that is," I thought -- but the second I put it in the ground, itstitle evaporated from my memory.

Mystery plant Not-A-Hosta has plenty of company, including its immediate neighbor, Not-A-Lilac,last year's exercise in "set it and forget it." Right now I'd describe Not-A-Lilac as a bush with greenleaves, which is not a whole lot to go on in narrowing down its identity.

Anyone recognize this bush?

I am both amazed and shamed by my fellow gardeners' encyclopedic command of the plant kingdom.I am humbled, and frankly a bit cowed, by their ability to rattle off not only the common but theLatin name for everything they've ever planted. Phrases like "That's Santolina chamaecyparissus"roll off their tongues as easily as "That's a rose" does for the rest of us.

Listen to this week's 'Garden in the City' podcast:

Santolina chamaecyparissus is a real thing by the way. I'm so lame with this nomenclature stuff, theonly fake name for a plant I could come up with was "flowerillium floweridus," so I flipped to arandom page in my copy of "Taylor's Guide to Perennials" for something slightly more plausible. Ilove this guide because it totally gets me -- flowers are grouped by color not taxonomy, which, let'sface it, is how most people's brains register them in the first place: So pretty and pink, not so prettyand from the Santolina family.

I'm not supposed to have most people's brains. I'm supposed to have a gardener's brain. I'msupposed to be a walking database of knowledge on all things that spring forth from the earth, butit's like I keep forgetting to click "save."

Do you know me?

I do a pretty good job of faking it for this column, which ought to be sponsored by Google, becausethat's the only way I've been able to write about things like Bishop's Weed by name instead of "greenand white ground cover."

Apart from adding to my already significant inferiority complex, this deficiency of mine when itcomes to recalling names -- which also applies to people and characters in novels -- has realconsequences in terms of caring for my plants properly.

Case in point: I posted a photo of yet another Mystery Plant to Twitter and within minutes receivedreplies from members of the Santolina persuasion that it's a coreopsis. Armed with that tidbit, I was

able to research additional info, like the fact that coreopsis responds to deadheading -- meaning Ican snip off dead flowers and a second bloom will follow. Good to know.

Thanks to Twitter, I learned I had a coreopsis, and that I could deadhead it.

I also have a number of perennials I'd like to transplant to new homes elsewhere in the yard. They'rebeing crowded out of their existing locations by more aggressive companions, mostly because I havea tendency to space plants based on their size on the day I put them in the ground, not the sizethey'll become once they've established themselves.

But in lacking their names I'm also in the dark about their prospective height and spreading width,whether they need a lot or a little water, prefer their soil well-drained or can deal with crap clay, andmostly importantly, are they sun or shade lovers. One could argue that I need only look at theirexisting location for clues, but I haven't always strictly adhered to growing instructions.

Oh ignorance, thy name is Patty.

Hey, at least I know who I am.

Vegetable Plot

One of the cool things about volunteering with Global Garden's Grow to Give program is that I get tolearn about vegetables other than the ones I've planted in my own bed. Like celery.

Celery is a surprisingly high maintenance plant.

For something that has like zero calories and always plays second fiddle to the carrot, celery is asurprisingly fussy plant. If you want it to taste at all decent without slathering the stalks in peanutbutter, you've got to blanch it, which more or less means shield from the sun, in the weeks beforeharvesting. I can't imagine this is how industrial-sized farmers grow the stuff, but at Global Garden,the celery has been wrapped, by hand, in paper bags. That's some serious high maintenance.

Vegetable plot, week 10, looking lush.

Parkway Transformation

I have been beating myself up the past several weeks for failing to follow through on my grandparkway transformation plan.

Then hell froze over. At least I'm assuming that's what happened, because a neighbor actuallythanked me for all the landscaping work I do around the condo building.

He told me how nice it was to walk out the door every morning and be greeted by this view (below).

I realized my thinking has been all wrong -- focusing on what I haven't done instead of what I have.And gosh darnnit, it does look pretty.

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