What the hell kind of idiot...

The BBQ Pit
41

The consensus from here is that if those photos are representative, the garden is badly maintained, not “low maintenance”. Although the Romanian judge gave it an 8.5 because she liked the banana plant, and besides someone slipped her a fifty.

This flap brings to mind the controversies over “natural” or “wild” gardens in metro areas. These typically involve an iconoclast who infuriates neighbors by a garden that is in stark contrast to neatly trimmed properties surrounding it. Some of these incidents involve perfectly acceptable (to me, anyway) wild habitat gardens, some cause a ruckus because the owner is a slob.

In twickster’s case, the person’s garden is perfectly fine if he/she likes it - it just doesn’t belong in a gardening magazine.

42

I behind you 100% on this one, twickster (I’m another landscape professional - landscape designer and reader of gardening magazines). Part of the job of landscape professionals in our semi-arid part of the world is educating the public about how beautiful low-maintenance, drought-tolerant gardens can be. Running pictures like those ones are not going to help the cause. You expect low-maintenance yards to not look like manicured golf greens, but they need to be the optimal looking low-maintenance yard to be in a magazine. I don’t want to look at pictures of other people’s weed patches. I can see that anywhere in my neighbourhood.

People do get the idea low-maintenance means you never have to lift a finger - not so. My own yard is low-maintenance, and I’m still out there weeding, mowing, watering, deadheading, trimming, etc. occasionally.

I laughed out loud at the idea of September being the best time to photograph a garden. Maybe in warmer parts of the world, but around here, you’d get great shots of dead things. We go for bloom fast and furious around here; I’d say July would be optimum.

43

This is Texas, which is why, despite my :dubious: reaction to that date, I figured it made sense.

44

So, here’s an idea: you have a release for those pictures from the gardener, and no guarantee to her she’s going to be a profilee, right?

Get some shots of various other sorts of low-maintenance gardens – the Victorian shade type, that involves not trying to grow anything that calls for direct sun and about once every two weeks getting rid of the few weeds that managed to compete with the intentional shade-lover plants; the traditional low-maintenance discussed above; the xerophytic low-maintenance; etc. Then do a “how”/“how not”, using some of her pictures for the “how-not”, and (this is important) at least one of the good ones for a “how to” (so you don’t have her and all her supporters declaring war on the editorial staff, with consequent issues). Result: you’ve converted the valueless shoot into an asset, featured her as promised, and provided something useful to your readership. (If you feel particularly charitable towards her, add a note to the effect that “Many of the ‘how not to do it’ pictures are through the graciousness of Ms. Gertrude Mooseface, whose normally well kept low maintenance garden went out of control the month before our scheduled photography session due to unseasonable weather and personal issues (or whatever face-saver you wanna put here). We thank her for kindly allowing them to be used as examples of how not to do low maintenance gardening, and hope no one will take it as criticism of her gardening generally.”)

45

The year I visited the Iowa Tourist Center, I noticed a fine crop of marijuana growing in the badly maintained flower beds by the entrance.

Those do look too bad to be featuring in any garden magazine. I’ve had half the plants pulled out for a month now, after the frost. The other half are hanging in is all I can say this late in Wisconsin. Those pictures look like the beds I counted as gone a month ago. The thing is I’m weeding them now and moving perennials. My cosmos are at 8.5 feet tall at this point, and the ones that the severe wind didn’t wreck are looking fine. I like to watch the 4 goldfinch perch on the cosmos and eat seeds. Cosmos are a favorite food for seed eating birds.

46

Great googly moogly! Twickster, I’m not a gardener. Frankly, I find weeding to be something I expect to encounter in my time in Purgatory. I don’t get any charge from caring for plants, and while I can appreciate the beauty of a well-maintained garden, or even a nice low-maintenance garden, I’m not about to go emulating it, nor even trying to look at a magazine with pretty pictures of them.

And even I would have done something to clean up that mess before a photographer came over to see it!

Egads.

I feel your pain.

BTW, if your magazine ends up composting money often, can I offer to help with that chore next time? :smiley:

47

Of course that’s what I meant to say.

Never overestimate the intelligence of a Doper. :smack:

48

People are pointing out that I shouldn’t be bitching about this and posting links on a public message board. They are correct about that. I have deleted the pictures from the above link.

But hell, Texas is a big state, and I’m sure there’s more than one stupid bitch with a crappy garden living there.

49

Damn…and before I got home and away from the filters that keep me from getting into photobucket, too…

50

You’re not missing much – three closeups of plants interplanted with weeds; badly designed bed, unweeded, with overgrown grass and unraked brown leaves.

51

Well, sure, but I’m always up for some laughing behind my hands at someone’s garden tragedy.

52

You know, it did cross my mind that maybe she thought you would organise some people to clean up her garden for her if you wanted to photograph it…or is that just the way my sneaky mind thinks?

53

Okay, I wasn’t in time to see the pics. I’m just making sure that it wasn’t a permaculture garden? Permaculturists don’t care so much about how it looks as long as it works. :slight_smile:

There was a lady in Toronto who had a ‘natural’ garden with all kinds of native plants and butterfly-attractants and what not, and an uncomprehending neighbour complained, and then someone at City Works who thought a lawn had to be a planar surface of GolfGreen came in and basically bulldozed it, and charged her thousands of dollars. It caused a big stink here this summer.

Edit: but there’s a big difference between a functioning permaculture garden or a carefully-arranged native garden and an unmaintained cosmetic garden.

54

It was just plants that were in their fall cycle with grass thick enough to be considered a lawn. I wasn’t something that a good mowing over the garden couldn’t make look better.

55

Sunspace – I know what a native plants garden looks like. That is, in fact, what I’d been expecting to see. That is not what I saw.

She’s welcome to grow any damn kind of garden she wants to. I, however, don’t have to run pictures of it in my magazine.

56

Darn, Twickster, I was really hoping for a look at those gardens. I’ve been spending the week helping out our 400 private rain garden owners get a handle on any problems (in a half-hour!), and grading all of the gardens. What we are finding is that my co-worker and I have a totally different set of criterion for grading how well a garden has been maintained.

Any chance you could PM me a link to those pictures?

57

I’d had them up in Photobucket, which doesn’t seem like a great idea. I could email you a few directly, if you like – but why do you need yet more pictures of badly maintained gardens?

58

Professional insanity. Really, it is just to get an idea if my views are jaded by working in public, native plant, low-maintained (I’d love to say low-maintenance, but let’s be honest about municipal budgets here!) gardens. Would I see those pictures and just think “naw, that’s 15 minutes of work” or would I be as aghast as everybody else was? Where on the spectrum of “House Beautiful” to “Haunted House” do I fit in, these days?

59

:smiley:

Sure – email me, I’ll send you a couple.

60

Ah, Twicks, Hon, I hear exactly what you’re saying, as a current gardening professional, and as a past magazine professional. So, first off, a big ol’ Virtual Hug, and cup of tea to talk about it. So sorry that crap happened.

Low maintenance doesn’t mean No Maintenance, as far as gardening goes. Of course, gardening means different things to different people, but, a garden always requires some care to shine. It is very odd that the gardener you asked to profile didn’t have any awareness of making her garden look as good as possible for a photo shoot for a national magazine. So, yeah, clueless, there, at least inexperienced with how to show her garden in best light. Or, perhaps since you first contracted with her for the story, her life has had some foibles that have put the garden on the back burner.

How can you solve that unexpected stuff in the future when scheduling a photo shoot way away from where you are? Lay it all out from the git-go; what’s expected, that garden prep is neccessary from the owner a month ahead of time. Weeding, deadheading, etc. This gardener may have expected it to be a sort of garden Makeover experience, with the professionals descending and prettying it all up for the photo shoot. Most good gardeners I know here would have been frantic with making the garden look it’s best before the cameras came, so I’m guessing this gal is not so experienced. And, my specialty and style is very low-maintenance/native oriented, so it’s not that issue. PS, though, couldn’t see the photos.

To solve this in the future: I’d ask for photos sent a good month ahead of the shoot to determine exactly what the state of the garden is, so that suggested measures can be taken, and so, too, you can determine how the person is to work with. Yeah, falls in the Live and Learn category.

Here’s another Deadline Dilemma Hug for you, Twicks. On the other hand, isn’t it wonderful now how the low slant of afternoon light catches the blues of the asters and golds of the goldenrods? I wish you a deep, sweet catch of breath here.