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IT’S RAINING AND I’M GLAD. Rain is just what you want when you’ve been planting perennials. It “settles” them, helps their roots make close contact with the soil.

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Yesterday I returned from Upstate New York with a Honda Fit-ful of plants — really quite a haul. I dug and divided some of them myself, from the 20-acre property where I learned about gardening in Zone 5 deer country. The others were bought from a local couple, Tom and Ethel, who sell potted evening primrose starts for 50 cents apiece, iris tubers and columbine for $2, small spirea for $6, astilbe, ligularia, foxglove, and more. (If you want to know how to find them, I’ll tell you. Get off the Taconic at Rt. 199 in Red Hook. Make a right on 199 and go east a mile or so. When you see a sign for honey and eggs, make a left onto North Road. Tom and Ethel are about a mile down on the left.)

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Here’s the inventory of what I brought back to Long Island for my “instant” cottage garden.

  • 1 zebra grass
  • 2 big window boxes full of threadleaf coreopsis
  • 3 lambs ear (these are mostly 1 gal. pots)
  • 4 catmint
  • 3 turks cap lilies (that just happened to be mixed in with something else)
  • 2 rudbeckia
  • 1 Montauk daisy that never thrived upstate for some reason
  • 1 epimedium, already sampled by my deer last night while still in its pot on the ground
  • 2 pulmonaria (spotted leaves, pink flowers)
  • 2 cimicifuga
  • 3 yellow spirea
  • 2 obedient plant – never tried those before
  • 8 evening primrose
  • 12 iris
  • 4 columbine
  • 4 ligularia
  • 7 astilbe
  • 1 foxglove
  • a baby viburnum
  • a kerria japonica bush in a 5-gal. pot

Total cost: about $60.

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I got about half of them planted today. I hope they like the soil. I added generous handfuls of Plantone, an organic fertilizer, to each planting hole. (That’s my next-door neighbors’ house, above, and a rather sparse privet hedge.)

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Seriously, I know there’s no such thing as an “instant” garden. It should be fabulous — in about three years.

I’ll post pictures periodically as the garden progresses, in a series I’ll call “How Does My Garden Grow.” Your guess is as good as mine as to whether it’ll be a triumph, a flop, or something in between.

In the backyard, below, I’m not doing much right now, except enjoying the daffodils and watching the ferns un-furl.

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