A shady home garden can be left pretty well to its own devices over summer. If your garden is in full sun, however, you have to think along altogether different lines. Whatever you do, don’t let the sunshine tempt you into planting perennial borders. What’s good for your perennial flowers is going to be just as good for weeds, and things can get pretty wild if you’re not there to keep an eye on the garden.
You have several options here. One is to decide to make it shady by planting trees; then you can go on to the kind of woodland garden planting already described. A more interesting plan would be to make a large area near the house into a stone patio and surround it with either a low wall or a hedge, using fairly low shrubs, such as barberry (Herberts thunbergii atropurpurea), inkberry holly (Ilex glabra ‘Compacta’), or that old standby, burning bush (Euonymus alatus ‘Compacta’). The rest of the garden outside the hedge or wall could be lawn.
Even more interesting but involving some maintenance over the summer—or one grand and glorious cleanup at the end of it—would be a garden with a Mediterranean flavor. There could be broad gravel walkways and some raised beds with herbs.
I can’t promise you an herb garden that will take care of itself—the formal ones are second only to rock gardens in labor-intensiveness—but I can suggest a few perennial herbs that could survive a summer without you.
An obvious first choice is lavender. Although there are many kinds, some hardier than others, to many people lavender is just lavender—it’s purple and it smells good.
The lavenders you are most likely to find in nurseries in the Northeast (for the good reason that they’re hardy) are Lavandula angustifolia ‘Munstead’ (that’s the name of Gertrude Jekyll’s famous but long-gone garden) and, my favorite because of its deep purple color, ‘Hidcote’.
Thymes of many varieties will probably be the mainstay of this hot, dry garden. They grow fast and cover the ground quickly but do not reach any great height. They can survive being walked on and, far from resenting it, give off fragrance when crushed.
Cottage pinks would be another good choice. Attractive, with blue-gray foliage, dianthus forms low tufts and mats, and gives sweet-smelling, often clove-scented flowers.
The catmints are sturdy, bushy, gray-leaved plants that survive heat and drought well (occasionally, there is one that does not survive cats, who love it and roll in it). The little, mostly blue, flowers are not a principal feature, but the plant’s billowing shape looks right in a stone and gravel area.
These are just a few herbs for expediency; you could give yourself a whole winter’s pleasure reading about herbs. In fact, you might find yourself so enthralled by their history and lore that you decide to stay at home and make a real herb garden for yourself. There are books galore, an active herb society, and informative periodicals.
A drawback to this sort of garden is that there will be very little to see in spring; many herbs are late in putting out new foliage and the old ones can look quite tired and gray. Don’t think for a minute that things are going to look tidy when you get back. Some vigorous work with the shears will be needed; weeds will certainly have moved in on the herbs and there will be a few in the gravel paths.
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