I forgot

There are things I forget every year in the garden. Late winter is when I usually notice them: things I should have done last year, plants I've forgotten about.

I'll take a look at some of them now, starting with the weirdest one: this board that is wedged in the shrubs behind my yard.

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I put this 8' long board into the honeysuckle bushes last spring, hoping to use it as a "scaffold" on which to stand while I pulled down or trimmed the grapevines that I'm always fighting back here.

I don't remember it being as useful as I had hoped, as it ended up being 7' (2m) in the air, with no easy way to get up there. It proved to be difficult to remove too, so I left it "for later". (Later has not yet arrived.) You really can't see this when everything is awake and green.

These "surprise lilies" (Lycoris squamigera) actually surprise me twice a year. Not only with their blooms in summer (after the foliage has disappeared), but with their late-winter emergence.

You can see that there are several clumps of these back here, and that I've planted this bamboo quite close to one of them. They're so easy to forget about, especially in fall when all trace of them has gone and I'm planting other things. I should mark them somehow.


These plastic planters are years old:

They were crushed by a falling tree a few years ago so I moved them back here by the compost pile. I wonder why I didn't discard them immediately?


Remember when I removed that big Forsythia last year? I forgot that I planted a couple of small divisions of it a few years ago as a "backup".

They're both small but available if I change my mind about not having one of those in my garden.


I never forget why I keep these Euonymous back here:

The deer focus on them and leave other stuff alone (to some extent), and they nearly defoliate them each winter. What I did forget though was this plant will gladly go from shrub to vine:

I'll have to remove this, as it's already 20' (6m) up the tree.


Hey, I'm not the only one forgetting things in my garden:

The cable TV company ran this "temporary" line through my yard last summer while they waited for the crew to bury a new line in the front yard utility easement. That line got buried six months ago, yet this line remains. They'll get to it eventually, right?


I usually bring this variegated ivy into the garage for winter, but not this year:

Did I forget, or did I just not care? Let's say that I did it as an experiment to see if it was as cold-hardy as the evergreen ivy in other parts of my yard. It seems that it is.


Other plants, not so cold-hardy:

This Dracaena wasn't doing well in the house, so I brought it outdoors to rejuvenate. Except I didn't bring it back inside soon enough and a freeze got it.


I always forget that terra cotta is not freeze-proof either:

Just because it seems to make it through one or two winters doesn't mean it's not going to spall, split, and crumble someday.


I forgot that one of the first perennials to emerge every year is the Dicentra ("bleeding hearts"):

It's unfortunate that two of my three plantings of this are in the area where I overwinter pots deeply covered in mulch.

Having your earliest emergers covered in 10" (25cm) of mulch is not ideal, especially if they have tender stalks that can easily be snapped when removing mulch. (Luckily I remembered these early enough!)


And finally, like almost every single year, I forgot to deadhead the Chasmanthium latifolium:

I like to think that birds are eating all of the seeds, but experience tells me that I'm going to have lots of seedlings once it warms up. Why do I never do this?


So what have you forgotten in the garden this past year?

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