Hasta la Vista, Hostas!

A Fall Cleanup in a Downtown Toronto Courtyard

If you grow hostas in Toronto (and who doesn't, it seems), you knew this day would come. Your clumps of slug bait prized perennials have finally collapsed and on their way to becoming a slimy mess. What to do? Cut them down now or deal with the mess next spring? A perennial question, indeed.

Hostas have their virtues, don't get me wrong: they are practically indestructible in most soils with decent drainage, there are hundreds of varieties in the market and are useful in garden designs as specimens or "filler". I like to consider hostas as "perennials with training wheels" for newbies as they are often found for sale in the same places you'd pick up a can of paint or drywall, forgiving of abuse and relatively inexpensive. I certainly bought more than a few when I first started planting in my current garden decades ago.

So it's no surprise that I see hostas in many of the gardens I work in and, at this time of the year, I've been dealing with them almost daily during my fall cleanup sessions for clients. This post will yet again show hostas "melting" into winter dormancy which kind of describes my physical condition at the end of another work season!

If you like hostas and yews, you're in for a treat (sarcasm inserted). This condo courtyard profiled in this post (and in another post titled "Weeding Raised Beds in a Central Toronto Courtyard: Getting Gritty in Downtown Toronto") has a dozen or so curvilinear raised beds full of hostas and yews. The look of overall garden is firmly stuck in the mid 1980s:

Toronto Garden District 
Fall Cleanup Before

Toronto Garden District 
Fall Cleanup Before

Garden District Courtyard Toronto 
Fall Cleanup Before

Toronto Garden District 
Courtyard Fall Cleanup Before 

Garden District Toronto 
Fall Cleanup Before 

Garden District Toronto 
Fall Cleanup Before 

Toronto Garden District 
Courtyard Fall Cleanup Before 

Garden District Courtyard 
Toronto Fall Cleanup Before 

It's a "mow-blow-go" landscape maintenance contractor's Nirvana (even better,  there's no grass therefore no "mow" so you can "go" even quicker.) The work would simply consist of coming in with a few worker bees and shearing these yew meatballs and UFOs with gas-powered clippers, blowing away debris from the paths and getting back to the truck to check their phones and scoot on to their next job. 

I was confused as to why the condo board would want to hire me to look after the courtyard area, given the monoculture of shorn evergreens and hostas, but apparently the board members wanted to update the plantings circa the late 1900s and are even considering removing some of the more contorted yews and replacing them with a greater variety of deciduous shrubs and perennials. And so they called me for this spring 2019 project.

But between now and warmer times in 5 months, a fall cleanup was booked and completed, as the pictures below show:

Toronto Garden District 
Fall Cleanup After

Toronto Garden District 
Fall Cleanup After

Garden District Courtyard 
Toronto Fall Cleanup After 

Toronto Garden District 
Courtyard Fall Cleanup After

Garden District Toronto 
Fall Cleanup After

No, these are not yews surprisingly. 
A "grove" of Fiveleaf Aralia (Eleutherococcus 
( syn. Acanthopanax) sieboldianus).

Toronto Garden District 
Courtyard Fall Cleanup After 

Garden District Courtyard 
Toronto Fall Cleanup After 

On a positive and hopeful note, someone did plant this small clump of "Goldsturm" coneflower (Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’) below. I left it alone for the winter, an "oasis" for hungry overwintering birds within the barren yew-dominated courtyard.

Garden District Courtyard Fall 
Rudbeckia (Black Eye Susans) 

They Really Do Sleep, Creep, and Leap! Perennials in a Toronto Garden

Occasionally, a gardening cliché is true

If you've been gardening long enough, you've come across your share of horticultural rules of thumb, proverbs, observations, truisms, etc.. Nuggets of horticultural wisdom like "choose the right plant for the right space", "feed the soil, not the plant" and "plant a fifty-five cent plant in a five dollar hole" (amen) are good pieces of advice. I wish I'd listen to these adages as a new gardener many years ago--it would have saved me a ton of heartache (and cash) by preventing many of the plants I bought from inexplicably perishing or taking over the entire bed. But this is just tuition paid by a newbie gardener so "chin up", to use another idiom.

New Danforth Greektown perennial garden

Speaking of idioms. another horticultural saying came to my mind when I last visited a garden I designed about three years ago in Toronto's Greektown neighbourhood (a.k.a. "The Danforth" area).

(The installation is profiled in my blog post titled A new garden in the Danforth/Greektown area of Toronto: a case study.)

I usually tidy up this backyard garden in the spring and fall so it's interesting to see if the original plants I planted have thrived or not. Even after researching what the "correct" plant should be based on existing site conditions and the garden owner's preferences, whether the newly transplanted perennial, shrub or tree actually lives is a bit of crap shoot. Things just fade away, occasionally, even with adequate cultural conditions and plant care. The plant warranty honoured by the garden centre is there for such tragedies.

Transplanting not only involves the "right plant, right place" adage but also, when spacing out the proposed holes, imaging how the mature size of whatever you're plopping in (remember, "five dollar hole") will look in five years and beyond (this is especially true for trees but some homeowners ignore this, to the future benefit of tree trimming companies.) For herbaceous perennials, it's been said, one should expect them to "sleep" during the first year after transplanting. "creep" during year two and, fingers crossed, "leap!" in year three and beyond.

But what does this saying mean?

It's not unusual for newly planted perennials to simply "sit" in the garden. They've likely experienced some transplant shock from being displaced out of the cozy confines of the greenhouse straight into your garden but I also suspect they're using more food energy (carbohydrates) in establishing new roots and not necessarily concerned about pumping out new leaves or flowers for our enjoyment.

That's my best guess anyway.

Nevertheless, I'm delighted to report that sleeping, creeping and leaping definitely have occurred in this perennial garden over the past three years!

East view:

I've broken up the "garden in progress" pictures into three views to make things easier to follow.

Below is the set looking east showing how the newly transplanted perennials and "Seiryu" cut-leaf Japanese maple are doing since 2014. (The two two columnar European Hornbeams (Carpinus betulus "Columnaris" ) were planted in 2015.)

The Danforth new garden design after

"Honorine Jobert" Japanese Anemone
(Anemone x hybrida) and friends

New Greektown Toronto perennial garden 

If you're wondering out loud "holy cow, that's a lot of green!", you're absolutely right. The client wanted perennials and trees with green foliage and white flowers. That's it. Whether the monochromatic colour scheme is tranquil or boring is, of course, determined through the eyes of the beholder. I personally find it calming and quasi-formal without the need for boxwoods, yews and other evergreens clipped within an inch of their lives. The different foliage shapes give enough contrasting visual interest to prevent one from falling asleep in the garden (although there are worse experiences in life.)

North view:

The Danforth garden design before 

The Danforth garden design after 

New Danforth backyard year two

Greektown Toronto garden design after 

North-east view:

The Danforth Toronto garden design before  

The Danforth Toronto garden design after  

Monochromatic green garden design Danforth backyard 

Greektown Toronto new perennial garden 

I find the "sleep, creep and leap" rhyme is useful to manage the expectations of impatient gardeners and, importantly for me, impatient clients. On the other hand, "sleep, creep and weep" is just as educational to the gardener. I'll readily admit I've planted trendy and "must-have" (i.e., expensive) perennials and shrubs as dictated by some marketing guy or gal only to experience the silly plant sulking and disappearing after a few years.

As I mentioned earlier, gardening is a bit of a crap shoot at times but we still dig, hope and smile if we're successful.