BY HEATHER KILLEN
Annapolis Spectator
Green thumbs of all varieties can now get the dirt on choosing the best plants for Atlantic Canadian gardens.
Jodi DeLong of Scott’s Bay is launching her latest book, Plants for Atlantic Gardens, at the Telegraph Tea Room in Melvern Square Feb. 26. A regular contributor to Saltscapes magazine and the Halifax Sunday Herald, this is DeLong’s second book.
Plants for Atlantic Gardens is a colourful, go-to guide for growing on the East Coast, complete with 200 colour photos, a hardiness map, sidebars on native plants and soil types. DeLong profiles over 100 of the best species for Atlantic Canada.
Plants you may recognize but maybe can’t name are richly illustrated and profiled in DeLong’s easy and engaging writing style. She not only uses the plants’ proper names, but offers up some common ones as well so gardeners of all experience levels can be on the same page.
Each description includes vital information on growing requirements, hardiness, height and bloom time: it’s an ideal resource for anyone interested in designing gardens. She also offers insight about some of the history and her experience with the species.
A collection of appendices in the back of the book provides lists of specialty plants, such as salt-tolerant, drought and deer resistant species; as well as plants that attract pollinators.
Delong adds “getting more bang with your bugs” is one of her pet topics. Lady bugs, monarch butterflies and various types of wasps, beetles, flies and bees all play important roles in the ecosystem, helping pollinate plants and naturally reducing garden pests, such as aphids. While bumblebees and butterflies are helping themselves to pollen, they are helping the fruits and plants to reproduce. Ladybugs aren’t just charming to look at: they eat aphids, the bane of rose growers.
People obsessing over the perfect lawn can create a lot of problems for nature, she adds. When it comes to fighting weeds, her best advice is to pick your battles. Spraying for dandelions and coltsfoot cuts down on the number of available early pollinators and gives the bees less to buzz about.
“What people don’t realize is the good bugs will take care of the bad bugs,” she says.
“That’s not to say I don’t wage my own weed battles.’
Goutweed.
Of her unofficial gardeners’ list of say-no-mores, DeLong calls Japanese Knotweed the Dr. Who of invasive species. With shoots strong enough to penetrate concrete, gardeners can try and cut it back: it will simply regenerate like a science fiction character. Her best advice: chop it back and cover it with very heavy black plastic for about two years.
DeLong will sign copies of Plants For Atlantic Gardens at the Telegraph Tea Room in Melvern Square from 2 p.m. until 3:30 p.m. Feb. 26, and will be in Wolfville at the Box of Delights Bookstore March 5 at 2 p.m.
For information on Jodi DeLong read her blog, visit bloomingwriter.blogspot.com, find her on Facebook, www.facebook.com/Bloomingwriter , and Twitter at www.twitter.com/bloomingwriter
