As winter turns into spring, embrace your plant lust

Gardening in spring should be fun. It’s not meant to be a race or a competition. And it’s definitely not supposed to be stressful. If you’re sweating it, you’re working way too hard.

Plants want to grow, it’s in their nature. They want to thrive. Trust me, it’s not that difficult to take a healthy, happy plant and dig a hole for it. You can do it and the rewards are worth it.

My advice is to embrace spring fever with all your heart. If you get carried away at the garden centre and end up buying more plants than you should have, well, that’s OK, so be it ... it just means more fun for you when you get home and have all those fabulous plants to play around with.

So, in the spirit of having fun and discovering the lasting pleasures of being a green thumb, here are a few delights to experience and opportunities to consider as you get out into your garden this month:

• Plant lust is not a bad thing. Every gardener gets this. It’s the excitement you feel as you are driving to the garden centre to buy new plants. Some have compared it to the feeling of going to meet a lover. Plant lust — the desire to possess every beautiful plant in the book — is a very common condition, especially in new, passionate gardeners.

It is a wonderful phase, so don’t suppress it. Laugh about it because every gardener knows exactly what you are feeling. However, when you start to sneak plants into your garden behind your partner’s back ... well, maybe then it’s time for counselling.

But my advice is: Don’t resist falling in love with the beauty of plants and wanting to experiment with them. It’s a terrific place to be. Have no guilt.

• Consider becoming a specialist. Some people get a lot of pleasure from concentrating on one genus, such as rhododendrons, fuchsias, roses or pelargoniums. It’s perfectly normal, although I have noticed that this desire seems to affect more men than women in the gardening world. It can be an exciting thing to specialize, perhaps concentrating on collecting a fine assortment of primula or clematis or hellebore. You need room if you’re going to collect trees or bamboo, but all things are possible, even if you decided to go completely potty and grow everything in containers. You could start by going to one of the specialty plant sales this spring.

• Try something trendy. Monochromatic white gardens were big back in Vita Sackville- West’s day in the 1940s, but green- on- green gardens are increasingly popular today where lady’s mantle and hostas and all- green ground covers are placed next to boxwood balls and serpentine yew hedging to create soothing shades and textures of green. Growing food in containers is also trendy. You can pot up some herbs or blueberries or even grow a fruit tree in a container. Plants in a picture frame, especially heatlovers like echeveria and sedums, is another idea catching attention. You’ll find excellent examples at WIG nursery in Burnaby and Phoenix Perennials in Richmond.

• Give lilies their day. It is the most often overlooked garden project: planting lilies. I don’t know why. We forget to do it in March and then when we see lilies looking fabulous in other people’s gardens, we remember ... and kick ourselves. Don’t miss the boat on this. Get those lily bulbs planted before this month is out and you will reap the rewards in summer and fall. Asiatics will give you great early summer showings, Trumpets and Orientals and special hybrids of both, will give you magnificent late- summer displays through into September.

• Vegetables for cool days. If you have well- drained ground — perhaps some raised planters — get the seed for radishes, broad beans, peas and mustard greens planted along with some onions, beets, spinach and Swiss chard. The general rule is to wait until after the date of the last frost, which is usually around March 29, to get going on other stuff like spinach, lettuce and cabbage. Last year, spring was so cool for so long, everyone was harvesting great piles of lettuce, which loves cool temperatures. Could be the same this year.

• Double your money. March is the perfect month for dividing perennials, one way to double your stock and save money doing it. Day lilies, phlox, rudbeckia, shasta daisies, primula, astilbes, hostas, you name it, can all be lifted and sliced into two ( or three) and replanted to create new colonies or traded with other gardeners or given away as gifts to friends.

• Edit and delete. Decide what can stay and what should go. One of the skills of a gardener is to edit out what is superfluous and delete what is unproductive and unrewarding. Walk your garden and decide if plants deserve the space they occupy. If they are not producing or giving you some pleasure or serving some useful purpose, it is probably time to show them the door and make room for something new and exciting.