A Gardening Year: May
An Apology to Myself as a Gardener
A Gardening Year
Volume 5
May: Late-Spring: Cool-season flowers bloom, and it finally feels like all the early work is paying off. Warm-season seedlings go in the ground as the soil warms up. I’m still sowing successions and flipping beds. The pace picks up, it feels like there’s always something that needs doing but the long evenings make it easier to keep going.
Dear Reader,
I’ve been reading A Southern Garden by Elizabeth Lawrence, a book I stumbled across at the local bookstore on a rainy day in the employee favorites section. It had a light green cover with a very Kincade-esque cottage garden painting, sentimental and a little kitschy, but sweet in a way.
Here in America, we don’t have much widely known or celebrated literature about gardens or gardening, at least not in the way the British do, with their long legacy of garden essays and pastoral reflections.
So I was surprised to discover that Elizabeth Lawrence was something of a pioneer. Her writings on the Southern garden, first published in the 1940s, have been quietly influential in horticultural circles ever since. She was one of the first to write seriously, and beautifully, about gardening in the specific climate and conditions of the American South. Her work blends practical advice with a kind of gentle, observational poetry, a record of what is blooming when, how plants behave across seasons, and how a garden can become both deeply regional and deeply personal.
One of the most compelling parts of A Southern Garden is that the first chapter is titled An Apology to Myself as a Gardener, and in it, Elizabeth Lawrence is refreshingly blunt.
She writes that gardening is a personal thing. What thrives in her North Carolina garden might fail completely in someone else's. She offers no guarantees. Instead, she encourages the reader to experiment, to observe, to try things for themselves. She apologizes not for being wrong, but for the fact that gardening doesn’t follow rules. It’s messy, unpredictable, and deeply tied to place. Lawrence acknowledges the irony of writing a book about gardening when there are no set in stone rules to follow:
“…one learns about gardens from gardening, and I must necessarily depend on my own records for what I write about plants. Any one person’s experience can be taken only as an indication of what plants do in a given locality. Thorough knowledge must be accumulated for the recorded experience of many gardeners. Therefore, I offer mine with an apology.”
Reading that, I found myself thinking about how gardening advice has evolved.
Now, most of it is so packaged to be seemingly absolute. Black-and-white rules that drive clicks, rigid how-tos that make everything seem like a formula. But real gardens aren’t like that. Anyone who grows things knows how quickly conditions shift. The weather changes, pests show up, a plant behaves differently than it did the year before. There is no perfect guide, and there are so many ways to uphold the ever changing creative practice that is tending to a garden.
That’s why, when I share about my garden, I keep this at the forefront of my mind. The lists I make are just that: lists. Mid-month to-dos that help me stay organized. They are not prescriptions. I write about what I’m doing, what I’m learning, and where I’ve made mistakes. I hope to be clear and conversational, like a journal.
Some of the garden writing I enjoy most doesn’t take itself too seriously. It is curiously open, generous in its sharing, and informed by lived experience. I don’t pretend to have the final word on how to grow anything. I only know what has happened here, in this small piece of land I tend.
So, dear reader, I hope that when you read what I share, you feel invited, not instructed. I hope it gives you ideas, but not pressure. And I hope you find your own rhythm in the garden, one that reflects your place, your pace, your particular way of seeing.
What’s Happening in the Garden
May is a month of transition. All the ideas of the garden begin to come to fruition, but there is also a sense of urgency, especially here in the South as the weather swings to hot and humid all at once. It’s both exciting and overwhelming. The seedlings that have been indoors for weeks are making their way into the field. The pathways are being mulched, and the farm is beginning to look like, well, a farm.
With the excitement comes a heap of lessons: some things are thriving, while others are struggling. It’s all part of the process.
One of the biggest disappointments so far has been the sweet peas I’ve been tending since I direct sowed them in the fall. I dug deep trenches and filled them with rich soil, hoping to give the plants a feast as they grew. All winter, I kept them covered with frost cloth, though the season was mild. In late winter, I added structure and trellises, carefully training them upward as they began to grow once temperatures rose.
Early on, I noticed something had been eating them. Either groundhogs or deer had taken big chomps out of the vines. They kept growing, slowly, but a couple of weeks later they were covered in aphids and began to yellow significantly.
It looks like I may be able to salvage a few stems for arrangements, but I’ll likely pull them out soon and replace them with a more reliable filler. As much as I love sweet peas, I’m not sure I’ll grow them again this year for cut flower production on the farm, though I could never write them off entirely. TBD!
As I walk through the fields now, the landscape is starting to take on a real shape. It’s exciting, even more so because we have a mulch drop right outside the farm. I can’t tell you how much of a dream it is to have free mulch delivered right to the edge of the property. It’s a small luxury that makes everything feel just a little easier.
The new beds I expanded in April are being prepped for heat-loving annuals like sunflowers and zinnias. I’m excited about the Astra Rose Cream sunflowers this year. I’m already imagining them filling out space in the field as the heat ramps up (if I can keep the deer from chomping them down to nubs before they flower).
Almost everything that was started indoors is now planted out. Varieties like Salpiglossis, Phlox Crème Brûlée, Nicotiana, and Chamomile are finally finding their homes in the field. Most of them seem to be doing well, but my Salpiglossis has been struggling. They’ve been infested with pests, and I'm not sure if they’ll pull through. I’m hoping they make it, but it’s also a reminder that gardening is as much about adapting to challenges as it is about celebrating successes.
The Agrostemma is blooming and doing surprisingly well. These were direct-seeded in the fall, left uncovered through winter, and barely watered, but they’ve been incredibly productive so far. I’m already planning to add Agrostemma ‘Blossom Pearl’ to the sowing list for next year.
The challenge now is finding strong focal flowers to pair with them. The Icelandic poppies, which I started in January, are just beginning to bloom. The flowers are beautiful, but the bloom rate has been intermittent. I have a hunch they’re not as robust because they weren’t overwintered.
I’m really starting to learn how important overwintering is here in the South. My new rule of thumb, and something I keep hearing echoed by other southern flower farmers is this: if it can be overwintered, do it, every time.