Mistakes, Deliberate and Otherwise

I've been wanting to blog about gardening mistakes for a while. I mean, the ones I have made -- I'm not about to go searching through my neighbourhood for other people's mistakes. It'll be a long enough post just with mine.

This is a deliberate "mistake." I know this plant is a weed, but it's big and it's growing like a ... weed, and I want to wait and see what it's going to be when it grows up.



This was a mistake we should have foreseen. It's not like we didn't have anything to tie the vines to the lattice. It was just very convenient to lace the thin pliable green stems through the lattice as they grew towards the top of the arbour bench. It looked quite pretty at the time. Who knew they would grow so thick and woody so quickly?



Unlike the previous one, the following mistake is easy to fix by going back to previous sources for birdseed. We bought bulk finch seed at the local farm supply store. It seemed to be a more reasonable price than buying the small bags in garden centres and grocery stores. I thought all of that African thistle seed that finches love is treated to prevent germination. Boy was I wrong. That's not some new brand of steppable ground cover there. It's thousands of tiny thistle sprouts. Guess who gets to go out there and chop at them with the hoe?



And finally (for this post anyway), the crooked pine. Take a look at this picture from July 2005:



Notice anything funny about the pine tree? Yeah, it's kind of flattened, isn't it? That's because in this picture it has four distinct leaders, and they are all sprouting heavy cones. The mistake here was buying a bargain, non-standard tree from a great nursery that specializes in trees -- especially evergreens -- that are rare, or beautiful, or large (in other words, expensive). It's not a bad mistake. It's just that you get what you pay for.

Anyway, we bought that tree at a great sale price mostly because I loved it for its odd shape. It still has an odd shape, but it no longer has four leaders. We removed the cones that were weighing the branches down, and removed the tips from all but the most likely leader. Later, we removed one whole branch to try to give the tree a more balanced look. This is what it looks like now:



I think it's still got two leaders. That branch waving out to the right will have to be looked at. Still, it's a lot better now than it was in July.