Moving a Garden

December 18th, 2018

   Moving 32 years’ worth of inside stuff to a new house is difficult enough.

Dug and potted plants are huddled on my back patio, ready for the move to Pittsburgh.

   Moving 32 years’ worth of plants and gardens is probably nuts.

   But that’s what I’m up to these days as my wife, Sue, and I skedaddle from our house in suburban Mechanicsburg to a house near Pittsburgh that’s closer to our grandkids.

   Most people just walk away from their outside when they move. There’s seldom the personal attachments out there as with the furniture, pictures, and accents inside.

   Not in my case. I’ve planted thousands of plants in my third-of-an-acre yard over the years and know all of them by name. I can even tell you where I got almost all of them and know by heart the intricacies of what they do throughout each season.

   They’re kind of like family. So how can I leave behind my teenage Japanese umbrella pine that I raised from a baby or that gorgeous Korean stewartia that I rescued as a forked orphan from the half-price section at Highland Gardens?

   Answer: I can’t. That’s why I’ve been digging and potting a few hundred plants since October, ready to make the move west. I’m using nursery pots saved over the years and potting mix from my containers, along with some of the superb, compost-enriched garden soil that I’ve worked to build over three decades.

Take a “virtual tour” of George’s endangered gardens

   Some plants are already in Pittsburgh – nestled under leaves in my son’s raised-bed vegetable garden.

These perennials are potted and sunk in my vegetable garden.

   The rest has either been sunken for weeks in my vegetable garden or grouped in pots on my back patio.

   The crazy thing is that even short a couple of hundred plants, the landscape still looks full. You’d never know I took anything out.

   For one thing, I’m mainly taking younger plants – ones that are best suited to being dug up and transplanted.

   For another, I divided most of the traveling perennials and replanted pieces of the mother clumps back into the ground.

   In other cases, I moved crowded plants to spaces vacated by young specimens that are moving to Pittsburgh.

   Although it’s technically possible, it’s not very practical to try and take bigger, older plants, like trees and mature shrubs.

   By digging root balls of manageable size, I’d also risk killing the bigger plants from too much root damage.

Goodbye, my Japanese umbrella pine.

   That means that unfortunately, I decided to let behind that umbrella pine, that Korean stewartia, a really cool dwarf ginkgo tree, and a rare inter-species gordlinia tree that a fellow gardener with a too-small yard gave me.

   Sorry, guys. All I can do is hope the new owners appreciate you and care for you.

   Late fall and early winter aren’t the best times to be doing a major garden move like this. Spring or early fall would be much better.

   This timing means I won’t be able to transplant my moving plants right away. The ground is getting cold (sometimes frozen), late transplants often “heave” out of the ground from the effect of freeze-and-thaw cycles on poorly rooted plants, and besides, it’ll take me weeks after the move to clear out the weedy, overgrown beds in Pittsburgh and have it ready for the immigrants.

   I’m planning to sink the pots in a big, old sandbox at the new place and/or in a “holding bed” or two.

   I’ll cover the heeled-in plants with leaves and hope for a winter that’s not too cold or too dry. I don’t like snow at all, but this year, a winter-long cover of it would make ideal plant insulation.

   I’m counting on plants’ survival instincts to make this moving work a bigger success than I fear. Most plants want to live and usually deal with moves and other offenses better than we think.

   The fact that I’ve gravitated toward superior plants and grew my “babies” in good soil should help.

   Come spring, I hope to get the beds ready and the plants out of their pots and into their new (hopefully) permanent homes ASAP.

   I’ll be working on placement plans over the winter so I’ll be ready to hit the ground planting by late March.

   I’ll keep you posted. Wish my merry band of transplants luck. And if you’re interested in a yard with a whole lot of plants, our place goes on the market Dec. 19.

Read more about George and Sue’s house that’s going up for sale