Get in the know to help things grow

You would be wrong, so wrong, if you imagined a gaggle of garden gurus shuffling off to the potting shed, whispering, trading reports of the trowel-and-error so often committed by the unwitting, the innocent, the ill-informed home gardener.

Why, these gardening wizards — the ones whose lifework is making things grow, and grow beautifully — they are gentle folk (deep down, anyway), and they’re hard-pressed (OK, so maybe some are champing at the bit) to cough up a litany of dumb stuff they see and hear from the front lines of Amateur Grower Land, the stumbling ground where plain folk like you and me toil with our trimmers.

Here’s where your trusty garden scribe leaps in to do the dirty work: We’ve cajoled a phalanx of in-the-know garden intelligentsia and begged them to please divulge the most egregious botanical blunders they’ve witnessed out in the plots where the amateurs roam. The dirt-stained sins committed over and over. The horticultural high jinks that really should be outlawed.

Here’s a litany of homegrown screw-ups, and ways you might right your wrongs:

Stop looking for easy solutions. If there was one dumb idea that made the pros crazy-mad, it was our infatuation with the notion that you can shortcut your way to a glorious grab-‘n’-go garden.

Mulching madness

“There is no plant on earth, herbaceous or otherwise, that has any genetic knowledge of how to live amid an accumulation of wood,” says plant grower, garden designer and author Roy Diblik of Northwind Perennial Farm in Burlington, Wis. “We are the only nation on Earth that gardens with wood.”

So begins Diblik’s diatribe against the overscattering of wood chips, wherever weeds trespass. Diblik wants gardeners to use mulch from their own plants — shredded leaves or compost from your garden, for example. “Your goal, remember, is to let the plants live in and with their own decaying leaves and stems, never again removing them from the garden,” he writes in his book, “The Know Maintenance Perennial Garden” (Timber Press).

And, adds Eric Larson, manager of the Marsh Botanical Garden at Yale University: “There’s a particular circle of hell” for folks who “mulch a big old volcano of wood chips up around their tree trunks.”

In fact, 2-3 inches of mulch should be spread evenly around the tree instead. When it’s piled against the bark, it traps moisture and creates favorable conditions for decay. A tree’s bark needs to be exposed to the air.

Give trees enough growing space. The gardening experts we talked to went berserk at the mention of young trees being squished into pots, or planted hard up against the house — blatantly ignoring a tree’s raison d’etre: growing.

“It’s the single thing I am forever contemplating having printed onto little notes to keep on my dashboard, so I can stick them in people’s mailboxes whenever I drive by,” says Kristin Schleiter, associate vice president for outdoor gardens at the New York Botanical Garden.

“Find out how big your tree will someday be,” she instructs. “And don’t plant it one foot from the foundation. Sure, they look cute in those little pots at your front door. But they will grow into mammoth, mammoth trees.”

Don’t plant in dribs and drabs. If there’s anything that rankles the garden elite, it’s the beginner’s tendency to buy one of everything on the garden racks. And to do so in a single binge.

“Don’t buy 1,000 different plants. Buy a larger number of just a few. Think of swoops and drifts and ribbons and rivers,” says landscape architect and author Julie Moir Messervy. And don’t succumb to one-stop shopping, she warns. Resist the urge to march into the garden store in, say, April, and buy enough blooms to fill every square inch in your beds. Instead, go back once a month for your whole first season, and buy what’s blooming month-by-month. That way, you’ll have sweeps of bloom all season long, instead of a one-hit pointillist wonder.