My beautiful pleasure garden – of butternuts and dogwoods

It rains and rains and rains. And that’s a good thing. Good for my thirsty slice of paradise. It now takes a lot of strength to grow.

I’ve walked through it every day since February, when the sun first began to gently warm the ground with its still flat rays. Watched the first green arms struggle out of the icy earth, how winter left my garden and took the darkness and icy cold with it.

And my fingers have been itching ever since, they itch so bad that every spare minute I run into the spring-like garden (there are two more children) with the holy trinity of scissors, shovel and chopping blocks.

Everything sprouts and has acquired this juicy, almost screaming green, which at first dazzles the eyes, which are still dull from hibernation. The blossoms of the cherry and apple trees have almost all given way to fresh leaves. The first bumblebees with their thick pollen pants hum to the still standing bumblebees. The hoarse screeching of crows that filled the winter air is now lost in the polyphonic song of smaller and more colorful birds. And when it gets dark, if you’re lucky you’ll hear a rustling, followed by a lot of panting and, if the hedgehog is lucky, a lovely smacking sound.

But the question is, what’s not coming this spring? Where does a brown hole open, where is a gaping hole crying out to be filled?

Behold, the wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) is no longer visible. And there, again, the Caucasus forget-me-not (Brunnera macrophylla), nothing but a few tiny, bare stems still sticking out of the ground, the pretty heart-shaped, blue-silver leaves all dismembered in the stomachs of voracious brown snails. Along with the remnants of hostas.

I tried the organic snail pellet. The snails laughed out loud. The more effective, but unfortunately not only poisonous to snails, but also in high dosage to pets, hedgehogs and those delicious tiger snails that eat snails, can not be sprinkled with metaldehyde with a clear conscience.

And to build a brass fence against the ravenous critters is too stupid for me.

So what to do?

Cry first. Weep for the lost beauty. cry for the loss. And then, after a few days of mourning, devotion standing at the brown grave, it’s off to the garden center! No, forget-me-not, I will never forget you, but now I must go.

Bye.

And always give me the slug resistant substitutes! I can finally stroll through the green corridors again!

Now I laugh out loud. The late forget-me-not was, I don’t want to say an excuse, but… yes.

However, it is not the case that I plan extra snail food to be able to go to the garden center again next year. But you need an argument that can withstand a person who helps fund your plant madness in large part. Especially when he watches the children, so that you can calmly migrate the tall and semi-tall shade and sun perennials, the climbing plants, ground cover and cushion plants, the herbs and ornamental grasses.

Why aren’t they endless, these lines of joy? I want to stay here forever, not decide on anything and stay forever in this in-between state, where everything is still possible, where all those beautiful plants are a bit of me.

No. Unfortunately not. I still have to take the gardener in the cart to the solitary trees, sorry.

Hello dogwood (Cornus), here I come!

I was able to control my piece of paradise for four years. And in that time I learned a lot. Especially that there is something else besides the garden center:

The wild perennial plant nursery.

Unfortunately, wild plants – species native to our latitudes that have not been altered by breeding – have been largely supplanted by non-native plants. They have lost their natural habitat, mainly due to invasive neophytes. To reverse this process and promote biodiversity we have, for example, conservationists, the asphalt breakers and the community service boys (thanks, Leo!), who use hoes, picks and chisels to stop the unfettered spread of these rampant aliens. And especially the wild perennial plant nurseries just mentioned.

There you get what actually belongs in our gardens. May all our bees, butterflies, birds and lizards enjoy it and multiply like crazy! After all, private Swiss gardens are larger than all Swiss natural areas put together. And in this, absurdly enough, the native wild plants have become exotic.

The Pimpernut (Staphylea pinnata), which is under protection, was my very first such purchase. What a name. What a bush.

The flowers are edible, in the past they were pickled in vinegar for consumption or candied as candy. The nuts, those yellow-green capsules with shiny brown pea-sized seeds, increased potency, the Romans told themselves, almost destroying the bush out of sheer belief in potency. The Celts, in turn, planted it on their graves.

And I put it in my front yard. A piece of paradise for insects has been created there. There I planted wild perennials, which will be big and vigorous again this year when the afternoon sun shines on them. Soon there will be wild scurrying around again and especially the hum of the white sweet clover (Melilotus albus) will be so deafening that it will drown out the planes flying far overhead.

And who knows, maybe one day enough hedgehogs and shrews, blackbirds, starlings and magpies, toads, slowworms and tiger snails will visit my garden so that one day the forget-me-nots will bloom again.