Growing Wisdom with David Epstein

Hi, I’m Dave Epstein with Growing Wisdom and today we’re seating on my latest bed that I’ve sort of opened up. It use to be lawn and I talk a lot about changing lawn into beds—it’s just less maintenance. I put this one near the edge of the road and you're going to see cars going by here in the background. This part of the lawn it really doesn’t matter that I changed it into a bed because it is so close to the road. I’m not going to seat out here and watch traffic go by but it adds to the beauty of just the entire property.

So, when you’re designing, you know, you could go out and hire somebody that’s an expert designer and you’ll get a perfectly wonderful design. You have to find somebody that’s in tune with your way of thinking. Are they formal? Are they informal? Do they like pinks and purples? Do they like oranges and reds? And once you find that person, you’ll get a wonderful space. But, you could also do it yourself.

There is no wrong way to design if the plant lives and you love it, it’s great so this particular design is really a collector’s garden and that’s actually what most of my gardens are. They are a collection of different plants. I try to mix colors and textures and heights. Here I’ve got this little weigela its called My Monet, I love it. It’s small; it’s close to the edge. You move into the middle, you’ve got these big globemaster alliums. These are wonderful plants that they are going to bloom in late May and early June and have those great seed heads.

You move further back, you’ve got this Pinus Wallichiana and I just love the weeping structure to this very informal but right in the middle. And it adds a lot of winter interest, you know, keeping its needles during the winter and you can see the new needles starting to come out. You move further into the bed, you’ve got one of my favorite coral-bark maples right there behind me of course this time of the year, not really as showy as it is in the winter, another Chamaecyparis here.

Remember that little weigela we showed you? This is a larger weigela. This is called Wine and Roses obviously much taller than the little guy and then into the shadier part of this bed we’ve got some rhododendron and we even have a little bit of a hemlock to add a little bit of winter interest when everything else falls apart. The point here is that you can design any sort of bed you wish. If you put in only a couple of varieties of plants you’ll get color for just few pops during the season. For me, this is going to bloom from early in March all the way until later on in the fall. We added these two really large rocks. People come by and say, “Hey, where did you get them?” Go around talk, to a construction person; see if they’re building a house near you. Sometimes you can get those guys to move a big rock like this on to your property and it really does change the bed. It breaks it up, it gives it some interest. And I’m really looking forward to seeing what’s the snow looks like. Well, I’m not looking forward that much but I’m interested to see what the snow looks like later on this winter.

One of my newest beds—I hope you like it. Come back every week for all of our tips and some helps here at Growing Wisdom.