Good old Thoreau once wrote, "I have great faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders." He was writing in a time when many still believed in spontaneous generation: no nasty sex involved, just the miraculous appearance of perfect little plantlets out of the blue. Botany has progressed, but we humans have not shed our penchant for magical thinking.
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Here at the dawn of the 21st century, with our second major drought in less than five years, many people still believe in infinite water and cannot quite wrap their heads around the idea that if the water table and reservoirs are drying up, we might need to rethink our priorities. This fall, failing a lucky soaking with some good Gulf moisture behind it, we’ll be going into winter very dry indeed.
But there are ways other than blind faith in unlimited resources to mitigate this harsh season. Improving soil quality with compost, replacing water dependant plants with drought tolerant species and finding ways to recycle household water will see us a long way towards a landscape that can sustain itself. Autumn gives a cornucopia of fallen leaves, expired vegetables and frosted annuals to harvest for recycling.
Vivid colors reveal the sugars and starches leaves have been producing under their green cloak of chlorophyll all summer. As microbes and worms digest the decaying leaves, nutrients are released back into the soil for roots to take up as well as adding spongy texture that conserves moisture. This is the natural way plants sustain themselves, as woodlands have done for millennia, a genuinely miraculous cycle of death into life. The fallacy of the chemical solution, which can create dandy nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium just fine in the lab, is that it bypasses the living soil. There are no lively organisms feeding and excreting in a bag of 10-10-10.
Collect dead plants and leaves in a pile or barrel that can be turned to keep them aerated. The more finely you chop them up and the more often you turn them, throwing a little dishwater in to keep it moist, the faster they’ll rot. Use the resulting compost as mulch or amendment in planting holes. Make chicken wire cylinders in the midst of shrub beds where you can inconspicuously deposit plant debris. In the spring, lift them up and spread the decayed matter as mulch.
Think about replacing a water-hungry border of impatiens, hydrangeas or roses with drought-tolerant annuals like tassel flower, lantana and zinnia, perennials like sage, sedum and plumbago, or shrubs like Virginia sweetspire, vitex and the vast array of crape myrtles. Study your catalogues and garden books this winter and learn a lean palette of plants suited to dry conditions in Zone 7.
"Xeriscaping" began out west a couple of decades ago and people often associate it with lots of cactus and pebbles, but it simply means using drought tolerant plants, often native species, instead of trying to sustain exotic plantings, such as emerald green lawns in Arizona (or Albemarle County in August). The County Extension Service (872-4580) offers a water stewardship program that teaches specific methods of conserving and wisely using water in the landscape.
Even if a tropical drenching gives us a temporary reprieve, or winter mercifully covers us in a slow-melting mantle of precious snow, remember what experience is trying to teach us and plan your garden for more droughts. We may have a penchant for self-deception and a dangerous infatuation with Technicolor turf, but aren’t we also supposed to be the adaptable ones?
November in the garden
Compost leaves.
Plant drought-tolerant species.
Learn about xeriscaping.
Garden questions? Send them to Cathy Clary at garden@c-ville.com.