Not All Jumbles are Equal

Not All Jumbles are Equal- stream of consciousness -6/21/2025

This spring was a jumble in the garden. At the befining of May I picked up some kind of bug that kicked my butt for about four days. I could sit at the computer, so I was able to continue posting to the blog, but my energy was scarce.

Early May is when things start picking up for gardeners in my section of New England. You can start getting out hardy plants, and under cold frames, you can start others. That end of things seemed to go well enough. And after four days, I recovered and got to work. But there were periodic relapses well into June, and I wound up spending one Thursday afternoon in an Emergency Room.

In The ER

In the ER, I was poked, prodded, x-rayed, questioned, and tested in all manners. They found nothing. The much younger Nurse Practitioner who was working on me ran through all the numbers and values, and looked at me and said, “Seventy-eight? You have twenty-five years on me, and I wish I had your numbers!” I explained with a wink that clean living could do that.

Over the next couple of days I started to recover, and as I recovered I discovered that thanks to the very cool weather the garden had not turned into a weed-infested jungle. That was the good news. The bad was that while weak, tired, and feeling vague, not all my gardening choices had been tip-top. I’ve always been a bit of a “well, hell! Let’s see how that works” sort of gardener. But this year, I took it to new heights. The garden is a jumble this year.

But talking about jumbles, I really want to talk about something adjacent to my garden, which started as an accident, is a jumble, and to me, is a success.

The Bog In A Barrel

The illustration at the top is of my “Bog In A Barrel”. This started out as an accident. It was meant to be a water feature standing right by my workshop, but it failed dismally in that role. The following spring, I used it as a staging ground for plants on the way to the area of the yard I was naturalizing. It got filled to about an inch or two of the top with gravel, filled with water, and plants were left there until their fate was decided.

Eventually, it started a life of its own. A few plants with nowhere to grow were left there. Some sphagnum moss was dumped there, and it began to take off. By the time I paid attention, it had turned into a tiny bog in the barrel. I started lightly curating it, but mostly left it on its own. I can only remember putting in around five of the species in it.

Build It And They Will Come

Build it and they will come seems to be the operating principle at work. When I took the photo, I counted all the easily observable species. I’m pretty certain that I’ve missed some. Here’s the current read:

• native Lobelia (we’ll see but it may be cardinalis with the red flowers )
• Native Lupines
• Gaultheria procumbens, known as Teaberry
• sedges ( I’m lousy at identifying sedges and grasses)
• Young Jack in the pulpit plants ( a carnivorous plant)
• Sensitive Fern
• Partridge Berry
• Native Asters ( blus or white, we’ll see in fall)
• Spirea tormentosa ( Steeple Bush)
• Sphagnum mosses
• Drosera rotundifolia ( a native sundew- a carnivorous plant)
• Canadian Mayflower
• A few very tiny, possibly dwarfed maples and an elm.

All of this happily coexisting in a half whiskey barrel

So there are jumbles and then there are jumbles in my garden. The little bog is a jumble that I am pleased with. The other? Well, we’ll work on it.