Over at Gardening Gone Wild, Debra Lee Baldwin (author of a couple of beautiful books on succulents) showed off a few examples of “potting area perfection”, including her own, and it got me thinking about the place where Gail and I spend so much time we sort of take it for granted.

The greenhouses’ headhouse was designed around the turn of the twentieth century as a proper potting shed – with cubbies for pots (and tulip bulbs, come summer), a “desk” with a hinged lid and drawers for storage, seed cupboard, shelve, closet, a dreamy soapstone sink (donated recently), and two benches, one of which is probably not ancestral and holds up the computer I’m working on now.

The other, in front of three beautiful, drafty old windows facing the Display Garden is our potting bench. It stands a good 37″ high, which just right for potting up little things, a little tall for the bigger pots; and is just as wide and long enough that 4 people can work side by side fairly comfortably. Bins for potting soil, peat packs and pots, and a mini-fridge fit underneath.

When I first started working here the bench was covered with a rapidly deteriorating sheet of Masonite and we always kept the soil in concrete mixing tubs like the one in the picture. When the greenhouses were restored in 2005, the bench was bestowed with a new polyurethaned plywood surface. We gleefully started mixing larger batches of potting soil right on it and now it has become cracked and pitted too.

We’ve been pipe dreaming about a new surface – stainless steel, marine-grade plywood – anything that might hold up to our use and abuse. And now after seeing other examples I have even more good ideas – it could have sides and a backsplash to keep us from clogging the electrical outlets…  A soil holding contraption could slide along the counter to make room for whatever else we are using the bench for today…

What is it about potting sheds and benches that invites wishful thinking? If I had to guess I’d say that it has to do with being specifically designed for its intended purpose. There’s a kind of beauty in that and it’s inspiring to see all the different ways there are of creating and using such a dedicated space. Ours might seem merely perfectly functional, often messy, and every-day to us but anyone peering in the windows might see something much lovelier.

What do you wish for at your potting bench?

While the weather is still so mild and the nights still so warm, it feels decidedly premature to bring plants back into the greenhouse. I’d much rather keep enjoying all the color out in the garden. (So much color!) But the time is absolutely right. It’s much easier on the plants if they come in with enough time to acclimatize before we close the vents and turn the heat back on. – That’s particularly important for houseplants and advice I really should be following at home, come to think of it…

Over the last few days we have brought cart load after heavy-back-breaking cartload of container plants back inside along with dozens of tender perennial stock plants. We’ve pushed aside the office supplies and made a colossal mess of the potting shed – it’s always gratifying to use this room (where I sit as I type surrounded by muddy tracks of potting soil) for its primary purpose – and it’s been amazing to watch the greenhouse transform from an airy bare-bones space back into a garden. (Click on pictures for larger view.)

Our one consolation for losing the plants in the (outside) garden is that they all look just as beautiful inside. Actually, there’s something about bringing plants indoors that makes them seem extra precious and lovely somehow. So lovely in fact that we decided the greenhouse is too nice not to linger in. We hope we will still have room for the livingroom ensemble after our collection of phormiums comes inside…

Have you started bringing the garden back inside?

I think I might have an inkling of how parents feel when they realize that their babies have grown up. It seems like the garden is suddenly full of teenagers. I have to crane my neck to look at some of them and a few are clumsily in my way or gangly with giant feet and terrible posture. They need prompting and prodding to stand up straight just like I did when I was 14 going on 30. And same as then I still have crushes on the tallest… plants.

We’ve been diligently staking the dahlias all along, mostly by tying them to sturdy bamboo stakes. They’re so brittle and top heavy that it’s definitely easier to stake them long before they actually need it. In the cutting garden we use concrete reinforcement mesh, raised up on metal peony hoop stakes to help prop up the slouchers. – That system really works the best for plants that have been rowed out. And of course the trick with staking is hiding the stakes to make it look like nothing ever needed staking in the first place.

We used to lash burnet (Sanguisorba tenuifolia) against a fence to keep it from falling over and now that it’s out in the middle of the pollinator bed, I’ve tried sliding the beefiest bamboo stakes diagonally into the ground to give the stems something to lean on. I have to readjust the props almost daily especially if it’s been windy or rainy but I prefer the loose look of that to corralling the stems with string. It’s funny that they have such terrible posture given the grace and airiness of the flowers and how big their feet are (the larges foliage is at the base.)

And if I had remembered how big anise hyssop gets (we planted Agastache ‘Black Adder’ this year) I might not have placed it right next to the path. It stands up straight on its own but we’ve had to push it back with stakes (same method as the burnet) because it and its legion of bees are in everybody’s way.

Do you love the tall plants too? What do you do to improve their posture?

Like any gardener, I am desperate to know the names. As much as labeling the plants in the gardens is a thorn in my side (they’re photo-wrecking shiny eyesores and no matter how hard I try, I can’t seem to keep up) I fully sympathize with interested visitors who inevitably gravitate to the unmarked plants. The name – Latin and common – reveals all sorts of mystery behind curtain number one.

I used to sit here with the enormous American Horticultural Society A-Z encyclopedia of Garden Plants on my lap and now its spine is held on with painter’s tape and the pages are loose. But it hasn’t been updated since 2004 and in an attempt to replace it, I ordered the more recently updated Royal Horticultural Society A-Z (2008). That encyclopedia is very nicely divided into two less-cumbersome volumes tucked in a pretty sleeve but I wish I had realized that because it was compiled for European gardeners, it wouldn’t have zone information. And zone hardiness (along with basic cultural requirements, size, flowering time, maintenance needs, country of origin, etc) is one of the things I’m dying to know.

Nowadays I pull more books off our library shelf – such as Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants, Annuals and Tender Plants for North American Gardens by Wayne Winterrowd, and Weeds of the Northeast by Uva Neal and DiTomaso. I also study nursery catalogs like Rare Find, Broken Arrow, Forest Farm, and North Creek just to name a few; and I check websites like Avant Gardens (since their catalog is on line now), Missouri Botanical Garden PlantFinder and the UConn Plant Database. By cross referencing, I probably end up with a much closer look behind the curtain.

As a new year begins in the gardens, I’ve renewed my annual resolve to keep up with the labeling and to that end they’ve been freshly organized (thank you, Anne!) and will no longer rest in unruly piles down cellar and poking out of my in-basket (thanks to Gail for opening a cubby!)

I already know you have to know the names too, so what is on your reference desk? Do you label your plants? (in the garden or more discretely somehow?)

‘Tis the season for us to count our blessings. Here in the greenhouse, Gail and I count some of our blessings by the hundreds and have just added peace of mind to our list. Today electricians installed a back-up generator at the greenhouse!

As optimistic as we gardeners generally are – especially now when our collective glass is half full of the sun’s tilt toward summer – we are also prone to gloom and doom reality checks. Can’t we all play out worst-case-scenarios as competitively as a contact sport? For years now Gail and I have been able to clearly envision a cold night. A very cold night, well below freezing. White-out blizzard conditions and snow drifted to the eaves… And some time in the wee hours a limb snaps, or a car crashes and the power goes out. The temperature in the greenhouse, which is kept in the high 30′s to 40′s, falls fast… This is the stuff our nightmares have been made of.

Despite the fact that nothing resembling that nightmare has occurred in years, Gail and I have both woken, heart thumping in the middle of the night imagining the worst. We have had makeshift contingency plans in place over the winter involving the tent heater, a portable generator, and me on call to come out in my pjs and headlamp. Even in the best of the worst case scenarios, we still imagined losing most of our plants. And to lose these plants would be a tremendous loss for the gardens. But now, due to the generosity of donors who wish to remain anonymous, the gardens’ plants are safe and we can rest easy.

The official start of winter gives us the gift of optimism – Gail and I are so grateful to be able to keep passing it along by way of our gardens.

Happy Holidays!