Guest Post: Garden Fairies Assess Garden

This shrub is not aware of the drought.

Garden fairies here.

We are garden fairies and we are posting very quickly while Carol is trying to do some clean up in the drought-den. A drought-den is like a garden, only without rain.

We just made up that word, drought-den. We are garden fairies, we can do that. We have no idea what excuse Carol has for making up words. But that is a topic for another day.

Yesterday and earlier today when Carol was out assessing her garden and trying very hard not to write every thing down as a “to do” item, we garden fairies went along.

Do you know how hard it is for a gardener to walk-thru her (or his) garden and make observations without writing it down as a task?   Well, apparently it is very hard to do, just try it some time. We are garden fairies, though, so it is no problem for us because we never bother to do anything so we don’t need a to do list.

Well, we don’t do anything planned, we should say. We are all about spontaneity, seize the moment, which means if Carol leaves her gloves out in the garden and a garden fairy happens to see them, then it is fair game for a garden fairy to take them and hide them, spontaneously, of course. We would never plan to do it.

Anyway, we are garden fairies and we went with Carol to the garage side of the house which doesn’t get a lot of attention.  Our assessment was that the Fothergilla shrubs she moved over there a few years ago are dead. The daylilies, which are really ditch lilies, might be dead or at least they don’t have any green leaves above ground.  And the vinca groundcover that was just covering up the ugliness is now the ugliness.

But right smack dab in the middle of all that mess, next to the air conditioning unit,  is a Rhus aromtica ‘Gro-Low’ that did not get the memo about the extreme drought.    We posted a picture of it above.  Look how green it is.  And it never gets extra water because Carol doesn’t water over on that side very often. 

Plus, we garden fairies know that Carol doesn’t really care for this shrub. She says she doesn’t like the smell of it. Duh, it is called aromatic sumac, she should have smelled it at the garden center before she bought it.  Plus, she doesn’t like how rampantly it spreads.  Duh, it had a tag, why didn’t she read it?  And, she is always talking about how she has too much bare mulched areas and wants more plants that spread.  Well, here is one that spreads and she doesn’t like it.  To that we garden fairies say “tough tomatoes”. We are experiencing an extreme drought, it is green, and so it stays. End of story.

However, if Carol wants to cut it back some, we will allow it. We are garden fairies.

Oh, and one last thing. This aromatic sumac has really pretty red foliage in the fall. DUH. Carol, keep this one.  We are garden fairies, we insist.

Submitted by:

Thorn Goblinfly, Chief scribe for the garden fairies at May Dreams Gardens.

P.S. We are sorry to have interrupted the flow of Carol’s posts about drought recovery, but we are garden fairies and we saw something green so we had to tell someone!.  We will try to not post again until she is done writing about the steps to drought recovery.  Oh, oh, oh,we just noticed that this is post number 1987.  We are garden fairies. We are going to try to sneak in and write post number 2000 in a few weeks. What do the readers think of that!?