Water, water, everywhere,

Nor any drop to

… put on the flowers.



(I hope Samuel Taylor Coleridge will forgive me.)

The Ancient Mariner was telling his story in order that
others
might benefit from it.
The gray beard, glittering eyes and weathered hands of gardeners
past can teach us many
lessons, too. Maybe it’s time to “stoppeth” today’s
gardener and tell the tale
of water conservation.

Many Georgians haven’t learned their lesson from the past.
Georgia has been devastated
by drought over the past three years.

Be Sure to Mulch

What can be done now? Any part of the landscape with growing
plants can be mulched. In
my neighborhood in Athens, more than 20 dogwoods are dead or
dying. Not a one of them is
mulched.

Mulching is the single most important water-retention process
you can install for your
plants. Shred and mulch all of the leaves that will fall this
year. Don’t bag them and throw them away.

Assess Your Landscape

What needs to be done for the future? Assess your landscape.
What do you have that
takes too much water? The high-impact-color area may need to be
reduced. These areas are
large consumers of water.

No, you won’t lose the effect you have now. A large color bed
can be cut in half and
still have the same impact with half the water. Just give it a
little height. A raised
bed, mounded in the center, shows off much better and gives
greater impact than a flat
bed. Drip irrigation under mulch can make the bed a
high-impact-color spot that uses very
little water.

Another idea is to use the entire array of greens and flower
colors nature gives you.
Green is not just green! It’s blue-green, yellow-green,
gray-green, silver-green and all
shades in between.

Long-lasting Color

In the green plants that form the architectural basis of your
landscape, color can be
present over an extended time. Just think of the crape myrtles
that give color all summer.
And one of my favorites, the althea, blooms all summer, and
drought doesn’t seem to affect
it. Camellias give us color when nothing else is blooming, and
hollies show off those
wonderful red berries in the dead of winter.

Once established and mulched, all of these plants are
drought-tolerant. They take very
little water and give back much more than we put into them.

Now that you have listened to my story, “may you rise a
wiser man on the morrow
morn.”