The perennial question

Planning what to grow in your garden and where to grow it is exciting. It’s fun to allocate beds for this and that, and keep records of what you planted last year to ensure crop rotation, and make sketches like the one below because you need to visualise the plot you will be planting. (From top to bottom: tomatoes, tomatoes, undecided row, watermelons, melons, cucumbers to the right. It’s a rather big plot)

Planting the seeds is exciting, too. It’s like the start of an all new adventure: Who will grow well and who will die trying this year? It’s the beginning of the Great Wait until the seedlings show up — a form of sweet torture that normally ends with joy. Unless you plant your pepper seeds way too early, which is a mistake we won’t make again.

And then there is the perennial question. Where. Do We. Plant. The. New. Perennials.

There is currently a small lovage plant on the bedroom windowsill that Irina planted in November just because. It took surprisingly well and now looks ready to go to its permanent home. The problem is deciding where this permanent home should be.

We can’t put it in the flower garden because there is not enough space for what will hopefully become quite a large bush. We can’t put it in a random place in the middle of the plot because the sun will burn it to death in July and besides it won’t be aesthetic.

We can’t put it in any of the new special herb beds under the walnut tree because they’re for annuals and we can’t put the annuals elsewhere because there’s nowhere else so nice to put them.

You think that’s all? It’s not, because next to the lovage seedling on that windowsill sits a pot with a tiny thyme bush that also needs a permanent home for when it won’t be so tiny.

We bought that from the supermarket but it has survived and grown well, hence the perennial question. Sometimes it feels as if we’re creating problems for ourselves because the world’s not throwing enough of these in our face.

We had a similar problem last year, with the tulip, daffodil, and hyacinth bulbs we dug out because it was high time to thin them out a bit. We had a bunch of bulbs and we needed to put them somewhere but not just anywhere.

To make things even easier than they already were, Irina succumbed to the temptation of buying half a dozen new bulbs and a place had to be found for these as well. We ended up sticking the old lot all over a small slope next to the path completely randomly.

They took and now we have a nice, randomly colourful slope every spring. Which, alas, doesn’t solve our lovage and thyme problem. And because we really like to make our lives hard, we went and stuck a few rosemary branches in water because while we don’t really use rosemary as a herb, except in an Italian herb mix*, it makes a great hair growth tonic. If they all take root, we’ll have four more perennials to place.

The perennial question remains open, for now. It will need to be closed within a week because the weather is warming and the lovage really needs to be moved as soon as minimum temperatures climb above zero. Deadlines you can’t change because they’re out of your hands are a great way to stimulate decision-making.

*The Italian mix (all dry):

4 tsp basil

1 tsp powdered garlic

2 tsp rosemary

1 tsp marjoram

2 tsp oregano

2 tsp thyme