Caring for Your Flower Garden

Caring for a flower garden doesn't require elaborate techniques or expensive tools. What it needs is a good design, maintenance as regular as Father Time and a sense of what to do and when to do it. Here's a brief checklist that will help you get this year's garden off to a good start.

When to Begin
In most parts of the country, winter is cold enough to force hardy plants (and many gardeners) into dormancy. But much can be done in late winter and early spring to ensure good results when warm weather comes. Where winters are mild and summers are very hot (in the coastal South, the desert Southwest and the interior valleys of California), the emphasis on spring is misplaced. In these areas, fall is the preferred time for starting many plants, because they have the winter to become established before the brutal summer heat arrives. In Southern California and South Florida, where frost is rare or unheard of, it's possible to garden year-round. Many of the tasks described here are no less necessary in mild-winter climates; you just do them on a different calendar.

Start by Pruning Shrubs and Small Trees
The best time to prune shrubs and small trees is late winter, when the snow has melted and the shoots of the earliest bulbs are beginning to poke through the soil. Woody plants grow rapidly in spring, then spend all summer storing up energy for the next spring's growth. In late winter, their energy reserves are at maximum. Removing twigs and branches at this time does no harm to the plants, which are poised to grow vigorously.

Pruning in late winter has a couple of other advantages. Deciduous trees and shrubs don't have their leaves yet, so it's easy to see what you're doing. And you'll have a lot more time to prune if you do it while the landscape is dormant—before spring comes and you have a thousand things to do.

We recommend that you prune all woody plants—evergreen and deciduous, spring flowering and summer blooming—in late winter. Gardening books often recommend that you wait to prune spring-flowering shrubs and trees until after they bloom. This allows you to enjoy the flowers (which are formed during the previous growing season) before you start chopping away. This strategy makes sense if you need to do drastic pruning. But if all the plant needs is routine pruning to remove deadwood, eliminate crossing branches and improve shape, it's smarter to sacrifice a few flowers and enjoy the advantages of late-winter pruning.

Remove Winter Protection
In cold-winter climates, perennials and small shrubs (especially young transplants) may be heaved out of the ground as the soil alternately thaws and freezes in mid-to-late winter. You can stop this by preventing the ground from thawing prematurely. A 1- to 2-inch-thick cover of straw, oak leaves or evergreen boughs, applied after the ground freezes in late fall, keeps the sun off the soil and allows it to thaw gradually. If you put down winter protection in your garden last fall, remove it in early spring, generally when the forsythias bloom. (If you see new shoots poking up through the cover, remove it earlier.)

Clean Up Debris
Now it's time to do some tidying in the garden. If you have shade trees nearby, you'll probably need to pick up plenty of fallen twigs and branches. And no matter how thorough you are when raking autumn leaves, winter winds expertly seek out the ones that you (or your neighbor) missed and drive them into nooks in your garden.

Most folks pull up annuals and cut down the foliage of all but evergreen perennials after hard frost in the fall. If you were caught off guard by winter's arrival or simply had other things to do, now is the time remove the broken brown stems of last year's growth. Use a sharp pair of pruning shears to cut them off almost flush with the ground. Even fastidious gardeners leave the foliage of some plants in place over winter—for example, the sedum Autumn Joy (one of a large family of succulents) and ornamental grasses—because the stems remain attractive through ice and snow. But in early spring, before the new shoots emerge from the soil, cut down these stems, too. All of this debris can be made into compost; you may want to dedicate a space in your yard to producing this soil-improving amendment.

You may prefer to use an organic fertilizer. Its nitrogen-phosphorus-potassium ratio (known as the N-P-K ratio) may be much lower than its chemical counterpart's, but the organic material has the advantage of releasing its nutrients slowly over a much longer period of time. And organic fertilizers also help improve soil structure.

To apply a granular fertilizer, scatter it lightly but evenly over the surface of the soil. Mother Nature will water it in—unless you live in the West, where you'll have to do the watering yourself. If the bag is too heavy to lug around, pour some fertilizer into a bucket, and return to the bag to refill as necessary.

Safety: Wear gloves if you're using a synthetic fertilizer; it contains salts that may injure your skin.

Seize the Moment
Spring is a good time to make changes in your garden. The plants are just awakening from their winter slumber, so they'll tolerate being moved and (in the case of perennials) cut, pulled, or chopped into pieces without much risk of mortality. Your opportunity to move and divide plants is limited, though. Once a shrub has begun to leaf out or the new shoots of a perennial have grown 6 to 8 inches, relocating or dividing a plant may cause it to sulk or even expire outright. So remember that once the soil thaws and drains, you may have only a few weeks to edit your garden without risking your plants' well-being.

Assuming you still have time to act, what needs to be done? Think back on last year's garden. What worked? What didn't? By this spring, last year's late summer can seem ages ago, so it helps to consult your notes, if you made any, and to look at photographs.

Whatever you decide to do, sketch your ideas on paper. The sketch will also serve as a shopping list when you head to the garden center to buy plants to fill the holes you're about to create.

Tip from the pros: Late summer is an excellent time to look hard at your garden and put thoughts on paper and images on film. Have you had enough of that bearded iris's less-than-splendid May show and long, unsightly summer dormancy? Is it time to divide the ornamental grass that you bought in a gallon pot, and that now measures 3 feet across at the base? Should you finally move the daylily that once bloomed so magnificently out of the shadow of the euonymus that didn't turn out to be as compact as you expected?

An organic mulch—such as shredded leaves, pine needles or finely ground pine bark—provides the added benefit of breaking down slowly. Over the course of the growing season, it will gradually release nutrients for your plants and improve the structure of your soil.

Because it decomposes and disappears, mulch has to be replenished annually. You can apply it at any time, but there are two good reasons for mulching your garden in spring, as the perennials are beginning to awaken. First, mulch prevents light from reaching the surface of the soil, and that makes it hard for seeds to sprout—including weed seeds. The sooner you top up on mulch, the fewer weeds you'll have to pull. Second, it's easier to spread a layer of mulch in spring than later in the season. Once the perennials have begun to fill in, pushing mulch around their feet becomes a tiring, time-consuming task.

Stake Flowers Before They Need Support
Remind yourself how disappointed you were when a favorite perennial, on the verge of putting on a glorious show, toppled in an afternoon of rough weather. If only you had staked it earlier ... Well, here's another spring and another opportunity to prevent such disasters.

There are countless contraptions—manufactured and homemade—for staking plants, but two are indispensable. If you grow peonies, you must have peony rings—single rings for small varieties, double rings for big ones. Mother Nature knows when the peonies are in their glory, and she never fails to dispatch a devastating squall at peak bloom.

The second staking gizmo that every gardener should have looks like a peony ring, except that the ring is filled with wire grid. Place it over a bushy plant that has a tendency to flop or break on windy days, such as the sedum Autumn Joy or a hardy geranium. The stems will grow up through the grid, which will provide sturdy support and, as the plant covers it, slowly become invisible.

Of course, you'll need to put both devices in place early in the growing season, just as the plant shoots are pushing up through the ground. If you wait too long, you'll have a devil of a time threading leaves and stems through the supports. The trick, as in so many other human endeavors, is to see the problem coming and take a little time to prevent it.

Tools

• Pruning shears
• Loppers
• Garden rake
• Bucket
• Gloves

Materials

• Balanced granular fertilizer
• Organic fertilizer
• Mulch
• Plant stakes
• Peony ring
• Peony ring with wire grid