Oh Darling, got the familiar gardener's self-doubt thing going? Its a bit like SAD - it will pass. I have to point you in Christopher Lloyd's direction - opiniated, engaging and vastly encouraging. The Well Tempered Garden, along with any of his other books are a tonic for a jaded palate. There is a particularly lovely book, an exchange of letters between Lloyd and another garden luminary, Beth Chatto - 'Dear Friend and Gardener' - a heartfelt and practical correspondence. One of your countrymen, although based in the UK, is Robin Lane-Fox: an entertaining author - this is not an exam, Sherry - gardening ought to amuse and excite, even drive you to distraction but it should never make you feel less than you are...and that goes for pompous garden writers too. Gertrude is terribly english - cool, dogmatic but the sort of woman we would call either doughty or feisty. Finally, on a sidetrack, take a gander at some of the books on the great planthunters of Victorian times - Hooker, Douglas, Fortune or Wilson - these men (they were all men, I'm afraid) were completely insanely devoted to the thrill of the hunt and the careful hoarding of precious seeds and plant material - most of them came to bad ends but they lived in an era when England was willing to pay for obvious status - a grandiose garden with the latest aquisitions was worth almost anything (no change there then).
In the meantime, avoid anything with many glossy pics - they are not real and will just make you feel even more disatisfied. Take care, my dear, enthusiasm will return just as the seasons go around- we are cyclical creatures and have dips and downs but the sun always rises.

Oh, go read "DOWN THE GARDEN PATH" by Beverly Nichols. HE will cure you. And he ain't stuffy.

Read "PASSALONG PLANTS" by Bender & Rushing -- you'll get your sense of gardening humor back, for sure. They're FAR from stuffy. AND they're Southern. :-)

Jeri

Great and dear friends, both of you!! Thanks for getting it. I will look for these. Things were feeling awfully bleak. SAD is right.

Sherry

Here is a link that might be useful: If only sweat were irrigation...

Yes, I second Down the Garden Path, I'm reading it now and plan to order more of his books. I'm a lover of 1930's writers, in my opinion so much better than today!

This book is not pretentious, is funny, and reminds me so much of gardener's today.

I also am totally addicted to Persephone Books in London, not gardening, but, again, writers of the 1930's.

Sherry, you ARE a gardener. A non-gardener would never have made it as long and far as you have. It's summer in Florida; how many people do you see around here gardening in the heat. I feel all blah about my garden too right now. I do my best to mow the grass and water the pots and that is about all. I don't even like going out there into the sauna to look around.

You just need a break. All the gardeners up north get a 5 or 6 month break every year in the winter. They don't look out the window and feel guilty about not tending the garden in the snow storm do they? They don't despair when all the roses lose their leaves after a frost do they? Yet in Florida we have to keep things afloat 12 months a year in heat, cold, flood, drought, and hurricanes.

Take the time you need to rest. Make plans for the cooler weather. Read some nice garden books :) Oh and look into getting a yellow elder plant. They provide constant summer color with literally no effort at all.

After loving "DOWN THE GARDEN PATH" I laughed my way through "A Village In A Valley" and "A Thatched Roof."

There are some very poignant moments -- particularly in the last, but they'll give you a different slant on the sacredness of garden perfection. (As will Passalong Plants.)

Jeri

Sherry,

Absolutely not Gertrude. Here's a memorable passage from "The Primrose Garden" chapter in her "Wood and Garden": "Every year before replanting, the Primrose ground is dug over and well manured. All day for two days I sit on a low stool dividing the plants ... A BOY feeds me with armfuls of newly-dug-up plants, TWO MEN are digging-in the cooling cow-dung at the farther end, and ANOTHER carries away the divided plants tray by tray, and carefully replants them." There's at least 4 garden assistants she's got (and you get the feeling she's got even more stashed away somewhere, working on something else), plus herself, working for TWO SOLID DAYS, on just the primroses! Those days and that kind of gardening are gone, gone, gone, for most of us, to say the least.

One can get rather depressed reading Jekyll's books if one forgets about all those gardeners (and, without doubt, other household help) she had! Especially if, as inevitably happens always and everywhere, one's personal garden is going through an unhappy patch.

I heartily second the recommendations of Beverley Nichols and Christopher Lloyd -- great, witty, empathetic books.

Debbie

Sherry, if it helps at all, I'm having a similar case of the summer doldrums. The large ficus in the front garden, that shaded the plants and the house had to come out, and it wasn't until it got hot that I realized what a difference it would make. Many of the roses, and even the day lilies, took a nose dive. In the back, there's a large rectangle where I'm continually having horrible luck with roses and that makes me feel like an utter failure. Same goes for another area near the driveway where everything is deteriorating. William R. Smith, in an area it should love, not only has no roses but not one iota of new growth. I could go on and on. It doesn't help that the new roses that I thought would make things "better" turned out to be tiny non-performers. So, just know that you're not alone, and hopefully Suzy is right and this too shall pass.

I did very much enjoy Gertrude Jekyll's book on roses; you might want to give it a try. She mentions many of the roses we know and love, and her love of roses is very obvious.

Ingrid

Plants mature slowly, in our conditions.

Our water is awful, and we have many days of dank fog. That, and too little rain, so we must depend on that awful water. We need to see them bursting out of 1-G containers, before we pot them up, and we almost never go from 1-G to the ground. In small containers, the sun can give root growth a little boost -- and we can enjoy their progress as we hand-water them.

So, unless they die, I don't worry much if a rose doesn't bloom much (or even at all) for the first year. I don't worry much if it grows, but blooms sparsely in the second year.

I really DO get annoyed with a rose that's been here for, say, 4-5 years, and isn't picking up at all. But I am joyous when a rose taken as a cutting in late Fall of 2005 begins to mature, and blooms for months at a time. Worth waiting for, y'know?

Att: 'Mme. Lombard,' collected Oct., 2005 as "Standiford Plot," now growing upward, and blooming continuously.

Jeri

I guess we all have our challenges in the summer; our weather is supposed to be 104 all this coming week, and by the middle of August, I sure won't be in the best of moods! Last summer was certainly a bummer, and I hope I've convinced myself (after 40 years) Texas in August ain't pretty no way no how!

Sherry, I think your reading is a great idea. Since retiring I've started reading again, get so much pleasure out of it, it just takes one to another world to see. I just pretty much give up on the gardening until October when it cools off, then am ready to go again.

Jerijen, you are an enabler, just ordered the two other books by Beverley Nichols that you mentioned!

I was just reading a snippet of "Down the Garden Path" on Amazon. Very cute fellow that Beverley. And then I come back to read Amberroses, Jeri (twice), Debbie, Ingrid and Ogrose again. You're all very cute, too. How funny, picturing somebody feeling lazy for not tending the garden in a snow storm. And NOT Gertrude! LOL. I'm sorry Ingrid's ficus tree is gone. And how much worse could it be than dank fog, awful water and no rain? Oh, yeah, 104 degrees might be worse.

Some giddy reading might do the trick to ease my guilt for not risking heat-stroke in the garden. I had "The Well Tempered Garden" in the cart but took too long. When I went back for it, it was gone, so hopefully someone else with the summer doldrums will be chilling out in the A/C, giggling to a good book.

Thanks all! Ah 'preciate you! Time to buy some books.

Sherry

Here is a link that might be useful: If only sweat were irrigation...

Forget the air conditioning, get up about 5:30; coffee, go out on the patio and watch the day come up, when it gets light enough to read, have more coffee (and in my case, a few cigarettes), watch the light play off the trees, the shadows, the ornamental grasses, etc. then weed a little, read a little, more coffee, more weeding, etc. etc. It gets addicting!

But I'm okay, really I am!

I know you are.

Sherry

Here is a link that might be useful: If only sweat were irrigation...

Companula points you in the right direction by suggesting Christopher Lloyd. There are many reasons to read Lloyd, some of which have nothing to do with gardening -- among them, his wit, his irreverence, his beautiful command of the language . . .

Be aware, though, that he's ambivalent about roses. In an essay included in Winterrowd's "Roses, A Celebration" he writes: "Actually, if the truth be told, I like roses best when they are at their brief best, in your garden rather than mine. I will gladly visit you then, swoon in the palpable aura of the scent, but leave before they fade and hold on to their petals, while later blooms in the truss vainly attempt to compete with the gathering decay about them." Ouch.

Elsewhere, it takes several withering sentences for him to convey his opinion of 'Blanc Double de Coubert', ending with this one: "I loathe this pretentious nitwit." Christo never leaves the reader wondering where he stands.

Sherry, I'm sorry that you are in the doldrums. Summer is hard for gardeners. Sometimes by the end of September after many hot days of endless watering I'm ready to chuck it all. You do need something inspirational. I agree with others Gertrude is great but not quite the right thing for you now. My friend Carolyn Parker wrote a book called R is For Rose. It made me feel good about growing roses. Please don't doubt yourself. You have such a lovely garden.

You know, the reality of summer gardening is just so antithetical to everything I believed. It SEEMS like it would be the best time for plants to show off but no, it's not. The wimpy plants are as bad as the wimpy gardeners about handling the heat. Here, it's a very long season to be twiddling my thumbs, waiting for a break in the heat - very much like Amberroses said about the northern winter, but previously this was not a problem. I also bought another book on Central Florida gardening and plants. I may have to resort to natives in the summer, but there are plants in the index that I just didn't know would do well here. I never can keep straight the eupatoriums and euphoniums - oh, that one's not a plant. Rudbeckia is one I've resisted because I hate yellow and black. Adapt and adjust, right?

Sherry

Here is a link that might be useful: If only sweat were irrigation...

I can relate to feeling like I have no business in the garden.

More often I realize that I needed a staff. Not just me and mom doing what was left alone to its own for the past 20 or so years. Most of the trees have an emotional connection for my mom; my dad planted them and they used to sell the fruit at our fruit stand or the local swap-meet back in the day (now there is the farmers market but that takes yet more time and energy to join)

Finally after 6 years and countless loads out I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. But that just leads me to more things to do better or change. I set goals, and regularly miss them because a new garden misadventure pops up to deal with. For example, we have guarded several peach trees because mom thought they were also good ones. We have half a dozen peach trees, most of them planted themselves I believe.

Some of these peaches are now getting ripe-small white ones, mom picked a bunch of peaches and spent a day at the sink peeling and slicing them up and when she was done had 3 quarts canned. She called to tell me she was done with those little peaches. I thought I would try canning a few too, maybe it was more being 89 that made it take so long and get so little. It has nothing to do with age! Those peaches bruise if you look sternly at them, have 1/4" of good flesh and taste...mealy blah. Now we both have a crook in our backs and I have a few more peach trees to make in to fire wood. They are beautiful in the spring, so I may leave them for now, but remove all the fruit once it sets. Funny, even the worms do not like those peaches. I do have a list of a few new trees to replace them with, peaches that do well here and that do not all ripen in the same week.

Guessing much like Florida, there is no off season, no time to sit back and think of the next years garden projects or look at how wonderful the past season was. It is warm out, weeds are growing, fruit is waiting to be picked, something needs water and more needs pruning. The more you have in the ground, the more there seems to be to pay attention too.

On the other hand, we can add living space to our homes by using the garden area. Places to sit on a hot day or zones to soak up the sun on the cold or the best spots for catching the sun rising or setting. If we were stuck indoors in the snow, we would loose those spaces for months at a time.

I am off to re-stack the wood pile, seems I need more room, to reach the roots of an offending peach tree and to fill buckets with small mealy peaches.

I might even have time to stop and smell the roses

Yes, yes, Kippy, same tune, different song. I hear ya. We all need borders who will garden for their keep.

I'm posting to say I'm sitting down to read. Quiet, please! No Facebook distractions. No noise except for the washer and dryer (trying to read at my desk in the laundry room instead of in bed where I get sleepy or on the sofa where ESPN is blaring). A book in the hand is worth two in the mail, so I pulled one off my shelf - "The Garden: An English Love Affair, One Thousand Years of Gardening" by Jane Fearnley Whittingstall. I like her writing. So here goes, hoping my agitated brain can calm down and concentrate on the lovely words and not be diverted by thoughts of new projects in the garden or by the dog who's not feeling well.

Sherry

Here is a link that might be useful: If only sweat were irrigation...

`No No, Sherry, summer is the WORST time for gardeners - it rushes by in a blur of effort and we are confronted with our choices every day - and often, those choices have been based on wild optimism, if not complete delusion. It is all watering, deadheading. snipping and prinking, moving pots and general endless faffing. When we do get a moment, we are too hot, dirty and tired to enjoy those fleeting moments of 'just right'. Nope, autumn is full of nostalgia and an elegaic farewll (next year will be better). Winter, a time of great plans, catalogues and thinking (and not doing much apart from a bit of brisk digging and pruning, AT LEISURE), and Spring, best of all, when all is potential and all still to play for. But this engagement with the seasonal round is also our greatest advantage - it is in the nature of all gardeners to lurch between past and future, while barely acknowledging the present- in the words of one of your countrymen, 'and we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaslessly into the past'

I, like Amberoses, consider summer our winter months. Time to stay indoors and do other things than garden. I try not to look at my roses in July and August. Frankly, not even Rudbeckias look good here during those two months. I'm doing really well to keep the weeds from taking over. It seems the millions of weed seeds that didn't sprout during our drought started sprouting in all the rain. Now that the weeds have a good head start, the desert dust is blowing in and has stopped the rain so it's back to watering. Oh, well, I understand it feeds our coral reefs.

Fall is around the corner and things will get better, Sherry.

Sherry,

I have always been impressed with the amount of labor, hauling manure, that you have been willing to do to raise the fertility of your sandy soil. So credit yourself. Summer even here is too hot and muggy to do much. Florida is a lot worse. This is the time that the garden is on its own. Plan for green with a few bright spots of tropicals. They love the heat and humidity. I find that they are most effective in large pots of same color bloom (sometimes of different variety but of same or nearly aligned color). And do not give up on bulbs - maybe not daffodils - but you can grow many that I cannot. How about Sprekelia or Haemanthus? also look at the work of Roberto Burle Marx, who was a Brazilian landscape architect, for that smashing tropical vibe that would be compatible with the Florida climate.

Cath