New Years Resolutions

It’s New Year’s Day and looking out my kitchen window the snow is covering the gardens and blanketing the trees, especially the evergreens. It was a wild and wooly New Year’s Eve so we stayed home and were much luckier than some of our neighbors who lost power. Fortunately we had the generator ready to go, a tub of water for household uses and pitchers of water to cook with just in case. Being prepared and not needing to be is great!

Given the snow outside, the dog and I spent minimal time this morning in the great outdoors. When I headed in to cook breakfast I spotted a book I had shared with my sister-in-law over Christmas. She lives in almost total shade so her search for plants varies dramatically from mine but there are several books that never disappoint and the Michigan Gardener’s Guide by Tim Boland, Laura Coit and Marty Hair is one.

For someone like me who responds to highly visual cues as I decide what to read, each page of this guide is great. There’s the expected picture of the plant along with info about its characteristics, habits and requirements for growth but when you’re skimming through (like Pat and I were at Christmas) looking for a specific requirement, the small graphics at the bottom of each page are a gift! There you can see in seconds what the sun requirements for a plant are: full sun, part sun, part shade or full shade.

For me January 1 is the day when I begin planning my gardens for the coming year, so there’s no better book for me to start with than a review of the Michigan Gardener’s Guide. There I can quickly determine which plants will grow in our full sun location (and the one little corner of shade) of our garden.

As you can see by this picture, I refer to this book a lot — so much so that I’ve tabbed the pages of plants that I love and grow or plants that I aspire to grow.

Since a gardener’s work is never done — even when the garden is hidden under deep snow —I’m envisioning what’s great to add to the garden this spring.

Since my focus is perennials (check out my blog post on two of my favorite books on perennials) I usually go first to that section. But this year I’ll be replacing some shrubs that are long in need of removal and that means studying up on what types of native shrubs I can use to take their place.

If you are transitioning a garden to native plants or if you are adding more natives to your garden, this book also makes that easy with the graphics at the bottom of the page. (A native plant is specified by a circle of green with a capital N inside the circle.) As I plant more native plants I see more bees and butterflies in the garden and I also find I do less work and less watering — a double bonus.

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