10 Plants I Just Can’t Grow

   Every gardener has them… those obstinate plants that just won’t grow for you no matter what you do or where you plant them.

   It’s especially maddening when others seem to have no trouble growing a particular plant, but the same thing seems bent on dying when you plant it.

   Sometimes these plants really are just picky about where they’ll grow. If you don’t give them exactly what they want and need, they respond by croaking.

   But other times it seems like Murphy’s Law or some other mysterious dark force of nature is at work, as if to keep gardeners humble.

   Your list of can’t-grow plants is probably different from mine, but for your commiserating pleasure, here are my top 10 recurrent failures.

1.) Mountain laurel

   This one is the easy top-of-the-list choice. Yeah, mountain laurel is Pennsylvania’s state flower, and they’re beautiful in bloom, but I’ve killed every attempt despite babying them and doing everything supposedly right.

   I’ve concluded that mountain laurel is just dead set on growing in nature where its seeds land and where the soil, light, and moisture is just right. These don’t seem to like being transplanted, and they especially don’t like the lousy clay and subsoil that so many gardeners have.

   I don’t think this one is just me, though. In the hundreds of home gardens I’ve seen over the years in my design travels, I can count maybe a handful of even halfway-healthy mountain laurels.

2.) Japanese holly

   Some gardeners have no trouble getting these boxwood look-alikes to grow and thrive. Me? Every try died within the first three years.

   I think the main problem here is Japanese holly doesn’t do well when starting life in a coddled greenhouse pot and then having to adapt to the realities of less-than-perfect soil and uneven watering in the real world.

   It seems that if you can get a new Japanese holly past those first two or three years, the roots establish and plants can go on the live a long time. I’ve never had that happen to find out.

3.) Japanese andromeda (Pieris japonica)

   I like the look of this spring-blooming broadleaf evergreen and the fact that deer aren’t particularly fond of it.

   However, my problems have been twofold. One is that lace bugs are drawn like magnets to this plant, where they’ll discolor the leaves badly by sucking plant juices from the leaf undersides.

   While andromedas usually grow through that and just look sickly, the bigger issue is susceptibility to root rot. Despite improving the soil, my andromedas have root-rotted enough to cause gradual dieback and usually total death within four or five years. I finally gave up.

4.) Dwarf Alberta spruce

   This is another one that’s done well for me at the outset but then always took a turn for the worst after about three years.

   Dwarf Alberta spruces transplant well and usually sidestep deer, but their main Achilles heel is spider mites. Mites almost always find them and brown them out a splotch at a time.

   Regular hosings with stiff sprays of water (or horticultural oil, soap sprays or chemical miticides) can head off trouble, but you have to be vigilant. Most people (me included) don’t stay on top of that steadily enough until one day the little evergreen is half brown. It’s a bit late then.

5.) Heath and heather

   If you’ve ever been to England, Ireland, and parts of the Pacific Northwest, you’ll be amazed at the masses of these two related little shrubs when they’re in full bloom. They seem to thrive effortlessly, even clinging to the side of cliffs.

   Chalk this one up to ideal climate and the just-right drainage and acidic pH of the soil in these wild colonies. Heath and heather don’t appreciate our summer dry heat, and if your soil isn’t exactly to their liking, they stunt and die.

   I didn’t feel too bad about killing these when Longwood Gardens couldn’t even maintain the Heather Bank they used to have where their native hillside garden is now thriving.

   Our increasingly hot and erratic weather is making heath and heather an even harder assignment these days.

6.) Lady’s mantle

   Heat also seems to be the main reason I can’t get this cool-preferring perennial to grow.

   Again, I’ve seen gorgeous patches of lady’s mantle in British gardens and even in some American gardens. But in my yard? They’re brown by summer and gone altogether in three or four years.

7.) Lupine

   I love the spiky flowers of this perennial but just can’t get them to come back after one enticing year. I haven’t quite figured out what’s going wrong since some people seem to be able to grow them as well as anything else. Maybe the variety?

   What makes this one particularly vexing is the fields full of purple-blooming lupines I saw growing wild in Iceland. If they could grow with no care in that place of frigid weather and wind and almost no soil (where little else grows wild), why won’t they grow in my garden?

8.) Pansies and violas

   On the other hand, I know exactly why I no longer even try to grow pansies and violas. These cold-tough cuties are one of the few color options for fall and very early spring… or at least they would be if rabbits didn’t devour them.

   Pansies and violas in my yard last an average of about five minutes. That’s how long it takes after I go inside for rabbits to find them and gnaw every last one down to nubs.

   I now classify pansies and violas as rabbit food, not really flowers.

9.) Celery

   In the vegetable garden, celery has always been my leading nemesis. This crunchy crop would be one of my favorites if I could 1.) get plants to grow to any decent size, and 2.) keep them getting an overly strong flavor.

   I’m pretty sure both boil down to heat and lack of water. I’ve tried growing them early and growing them late as well as giving them more water than any other crop.

   While that’s helped a little, I just can’t get the results of celery from the grocery store. So I’ve given up and diverted the space to cabbage and broccoli instead.

10.) Watermelons and cantaloupes

   These delicious garden fruits are some of my summer favorites, but like celery, I just can’t manage to produce ones that measure up to most that I can just buy from the grocery store or farmer’s market.

   These also take a lot of water – not to mention a lot of space – and they can run into a variety of problems with pollination, bugs, and disease. Hats off to melon growers, and keep those great specimens headed to market because I’ll never be able to grow them myself.