Breaking the Rules
July 29th, 2014
Buffalo, N.Y., which I dare say is the best city of gardeners in the U.S., held its 20th annual Garden Walk this past weekend with nearly 400 gardens open to gawkers.
Who says you can’t put a patio smack in the middle of the front yard?
The colorful, free-form, creative nature of America’s biggest garden tour has spawned what’s becoming known as “Buffalo-style gardening.”
These are gardens that feature lots of color, lots of pots, lots of plants, and not a lot of grass – especially in front yards.
Buffalo gardens also tend to have fun surprises around the corners and under the bushes, especially art of the found, funky, and homemade kind.
In other words, Buffalo gardeners are good at packing a lot of garden into a little space – and having great fun doing it.
They’re also almost proud of breaking the many unwritten rules of landscaping, those things you’re just not supposed to do.
Rule-breaking doesn’t always work. Sometimes you see in a hurry why a rule is a rule in the first place.
But most of the Buffalo rule-breaking I saw on my fourth visit there was OK to my eye. Six examples:
1.) “You don’t grow vegetables on a wall. Or a roof.” I guess you do if your south-facing house wall is the only place in the yard where you’ve got sun, or if your yard is so small that your garage roof is the only space available.
One gardener solved the lack-of-sun issue by attaching three levels of window boxes to the south side of his house and planting them with peppers and basil.
Peppers and basil growing in boxes on a wall.
At least two others are growing veggies in pots on their garage roof. One fellow goes up to water on a sliding ladder. The other uses a very long-handled Watering Wand (rigged up himself) to water the rooftop pots from the ground.
2.) “You don’t grow vegetables in the front yard either.” Front yards are supposed to be pretty and mostly formal… you know, with boxed-off yews and trimmed azaleas and such. Vegetables are “ugly,” and so they’re supposed to go only in the back.
A few Buffalo gardeners sneak tomatoes and peppers among the flowers, where they look surprisingly at home. Many more are growing herbs out front.
Who decided that anything we eat is ugly? Did you know that when tomatoes were first introduced to Europe, they were grown as ornamentals for their colorful fruits?
If you don’t want to climb up on the roof to pick tomatoes, many that sunny front yard is OK. I don’t think the neighbors will talk about you (especially if you give them a few ripe Beefsteaks).
Flowers growing happily along a front curb.
3.) “You can’t grow flowers in that little strip between the curb and sidewalk.” Oh, yes, you can. Lots of Buffalonians are doing it, and the most successful plants seem to be sun-loving perennials, such as purple coneflowers, black-eyed susans, daylilies, sedum, and lilies.
Herbs like thyme, oregano, and sage are doing well out there, too.
And a few homes even have patches of 6-foot-tall sunflowers right along the curb. They’re staked to keep from flopping over.
Flowers like these make the street look much more colorful and inviting than the usual curbside strips of half-dead grass.
Flowers also make much better sense along curbs than shrubs because they all either die back to the ground over winter or die altogether, removing the threat of getting dumped on by snow plows.
4.) “Most of the front yard should be grass.” Most Buffalo city gardeners don’t have much land to work with, especially out front. So they tend not to want to “waste” it on grass, which doesn’t bloom and needs a whole lot more pruning than flowers anyway.
One of the many Buffalo homes with flowers that go from wall to curb.
It’s almost as common to see all-flower/all-plant house fronts as it is to see mostly-lawn ones.
Maybe some people think some of these wall-to-walk gardens are overdone, but they sure do make Buffalo’s streets and house fronts look cheery. And the bees and butterflies seem happy about it, too.
5.) “Patios are for out back, not out front.” Some people have small trees out front that make for shady front yards. A few Buffalo gardeners decided to make use of it by laying flagstone under the trees and setting out small tables and chairs.
I suspect most people would nix that under the reasoning, “What kind of privacy are you going to have out there?”
That’s true. If you’re looking for shade and privacy, sitting next to the front sidewalk isn’t the place. But if you’re OK with shade and saying hi to passersby, then a house-front patio is the perfect venue.
A lot of people like sitting on a front porch. This is just one level out. Even if you don’t actually sit out there much, the furniture and paving look nice.
This flower pot adds a spot of color to a groundcover bed.
6.) “Pots are for decks and patios, not in gardens.” Most people think of pots as places to put flowers where you can’t plant them in the ground. That means on top of hard surfaces, like wooden decks, paver patios, porches, maybe at the end of the driveway.
Why would you set a pot full of flowers on top of soil in a garden?
Buffalo gardeners figure they look just as nice elevated in a garden, surrounded by in-ground flowers or maybe breaking up a patch of green groundcover. Flowers near trees also grow better in pots where their roots don’t have to compete with the big tree roots.
And as one gardener told me, you can also move the pots around during the season or get sun-lovers started and then move them to the shade for a spell. That’ll fake visitors into wondering, “How can you get those petunias to bloom so well in that much shade?”
Check out more photos I took from two previous Garden Walk Buffalo on photo galleries from 2011 and 2012.