My garden’s first spring: the seeds arrived. The wildflowers would spread, eventually taking up the spaces between the rows, and I would get out my white dress and begin my leisurely strolls. By the end of those five years, I figured I would have eliminated any perennial weeds and weed seeds. I would keep the weeds out for five years, by cultivation between the rows with a push plow and a hoe, and weeding by hand within each row. I would prepare my ground, about a half acre, and plant the wildflowers in rows. I knew what Lady Bird Johnson was talking about when she gave the wildflower romantics a look and said, “You can’t just scatter the seeds around as if you were feeding chickens.” Even the more responsible plant catalogs, in their offer of wildflower seed mixes for the various regions of the country admitted, “We have not been able to develop a mixture suitable for Zone 9.” So I knew it wouldn’t be easy.īut it’s hard to squash a romantic. Wisteria can lift a building off its foundation, and certain terrifying mints spread so rapidly that just the thought of them on a summer night can make your hair stand on end.

Kudzu can completely shroud a house and a car parked in the yard in one growing season. Honeysuckle can work through cracks in your walls and strangle you while you sleep. I come from down south, where vegetation does not know its place. I had been tricked by those pictures before.

The pictures showed a scene of rolling hills and dales, an area about the size of Georgia and Alabama combined, covered solid as far as the eye could see with billowing drifts of lupine and phlox.īut I wasn't born yesterday. “A garden in a can,” the seed catalogs said. I don’t know whether it was the pictures on the seed packets, or the vision I had of myself, dressed all in white, strolling through an endless vista of poppies and daisies. 'About six years ago, like so many romantic gardening fools, I fell for it: The wildflower meadow.

Bailey white mama makes up her mind