Keene native’s new book has designs on your garden

Keene native’s new book has designs on your garden

“Design and Maintenance of the Home Landscape;

Practical Advice on How to Design and Care for Your Garden and Grounds”

Kathy McPhail Beaman

217 pages, $13.95

As far as Kathy McPhail Beaman is concerned, New Hampshire is now officially in frost-free June, so now comes P-Day: Planning and Planting.

Beaman, who grew up in Keene, planted her first Lilliputian garden of Johnny Jump-Ups alongside her mother’s large flower field. Decades later, Beaman became a master gardener through a program of the University of New Hampshire, kept on growing and learning, and then wrote a full gardening-year’s worth of articles for the Monadnock Shopper News. She has now assembled these reports from Mother Earth into her lively, you-can-do-it “Design and Maintenance of the Home Landscape.”

“We all lead such busy lives that gardening time has often been pared down to a minimum,” Beaman writes. “Because of this, a good landscape design is more important than ever.”

Keep it simple. Keep it practical (i.e., don’t plant where the delivery man walks). Keep it beautiful with a harmony of colors, a balance of blossom shapes, and eye interest through restrained repetition, not boring monotony.

“Have a reason for the things you do,” she stresses.

As for the stress of cutting back twigs, branches and limbs, Beaman does her best to help people avoid problems because she has found that some couples spell pruning as D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

Give a man a chainsaw and here comes the Mojave Desert. Beaman remembers how her father pruned their weeping willow so it would not weep again. But her mother did.

That’s one reason Beaman includes ample details about pruning plants well to remain natural looking.

“Unless you have very formal gardens,” she writes, “almost everything looks better, especially here in the woods of New England, in a natural state. I have been taught (thanks to UNH) that even hedges can be kept in shape with a natural look.”

Beaman pinpoints some specifics:

Shade and flowering trees — “Mulberries have messy fruit; black walnuts produce a toxin harmful to other plants.”

Spruce and pine — “Make sure you plant at correct depth in well-drained soil.”

Shrubs such as forsythia and lilac — “Few insect or disease problems.”

Broad-leaved evergreens including holly and rhododendron — “May require special attention; water into late fall.”

Groundcovers such as periwinkle — “Wonderful for keeping maintenance to a minimum.”

Beaman stamps herself a certified “clematis nut.” With 300 species of this vine, no garden has an excuse to be monotonous. “There is a clematis vine available for almost every garden situation — shining alone on a trellis or lamppost, clambering through shrubs and up trees and rambling along the ground.”

Construct paths to be free-flowing and meandering:

“A path curving around a bend behind a bush or boulder is an invitation to explore that most people can’t resist.”

When you’re tip-toeing down the garden path, you may come across the “yuck” factor. What to do with these plant-eating slugs and other aliens?

Instead of going nuts, Beaman suggests developing Integrated Pest Management. “The first principle of IPM,” she writes, “is to avoid the problem in the first place. This can be achieved by doing something I am always preaching about — put the right plant in the right place. Plants have their own natural defenses against insects and diseases, and when they are stressed they can’t use these defenses to their best advantage.”

To fight plant foes, diversify plantings, let lady beetles, mantises and spiders triumph over enemy insects, and keep your garden clean and watered.

If a pesticide is necessary, use the least toxic ones that are labeled “Caution.” Steer clear of products labeled “Warning” and “Danger.”

Beaman devotes a substantial section of her easy-to-use book to charts, graphs and outlines containing expanded information on diseases, fungi, plant symptoms, home landscape designing, tree forms, flower gardens and other aspects of making homes alive and colorful. “Remember the color wheel,” she suggests. “Red, orange and yellow are warm colors. Blue, green and violet are cool colors.”

Complementary colors are opposite each other on the color wheel. “Blue and yellow create a high contrast, eye popping vignette,” she writes. “Yellow is cheerful and warm, blue is cool and tends to recede into background. Opposites attract, but use sparingly.”

Flower gardens come with many options — butterfly and hummingbird gardens, all-blue or all-white gardens, all rose or tall iris gardens, rock gardens, container gardens, shade gardens. The all-season garden is perhaps the best and most common of all.

“The wonderful thing about gardening,” Beaman stresses, “is if something doesn’t work, move it. If you don’t like a particular color combination, change it. If you’re left with a hole in your border with nothing in bloom in July, remember to add or replace plants in that spot next year. That’s what’s great about gardening in New England — there’s always next year!”