Busy season - Mild spring sends gardeners into yards, stores

Every spring, Patty Ball sees her yard at 3041 Melrose in Cape Girardeau as a blank canvas. An avid artist of horticulture and landscaping, Ball has spent 6 to 7 hours every spring and summer day of the past 13 years amid the stone walkways of her garden, digging and planting.

But this year, an unusually mild spring gave Ball and area gardeners like her a jump start on that preparation work.

"The usual rule of thumb is not to plant until after Easter," Ball said.

This year she was out planting trees and shrubs before St. Patrick's Day, almost a month and half early. With gardeners hitting their yards early, gardening stores have been busy.

"We've sold about 50 percent more this year than at this time last year," said Andy Abernathy at Garden Hill Nursery Inc. in Jackson. He said he attributes a lot of it to the mild weather but also to the lack of rain, which enabled people to get out more. Abernathy also said that higher gas prices have kept a lot of people at home.

The syndrome of warmer weather causing uncontrollable impulses in the typical gardener is what Paul Schnare refers to as "the fever."

"When the weather gets nice, people get the fever. They like to garden," said Schnare, manager of Sunny Hill Gardens in Cape Girardeau and a gardening columnist for the Southeast Missourian. He also reported a busier March than those of past years, but he too is hesitant to give all the credit to the mild weather. He also attributes some of the increase in gardening to a growing base of more intelligent growers.

"With the new magazines out, people are becoming more aware of different plants," Schnare said. "People are reading those things with a fine-tooth comb."

As a result, local garden centers have tried to expand their inventory on plants to meet these diversified demands. New gold weeping hemlock, hakuro nishiki willows, encore esalia, new salvia ... the list of additions stretches beyond the dealer's off-hand recollection.

In addition to the increase in magazines, a recent boom in home and garden cable networks and programming appears to have more people interested in gardening and landscaping.

"More people are seeing stuff on the Home and Garden Channel and they come in looking for things and ideas they see on TV," said Joe Touchette, owner of Plants Plus in Cape Girardeau. Touchette agreed that the explosion of home and garden media has people on the lookout for new and creative plants and landscaping ideas.

"It used to be that you'd see houses with plain green yews planted out front," Touchette said. "Now people want more color -- something more eye-catching."

Indeed, landscaping has evolved beyond the traditional mulching flowers and shrubs wreathing the foundations of the house. Nowadays, people are building walls and special patios, installing dry creek beds and waterfalls, and stretching out to their mailboxes and driveways. Schnare said a lot more people are doing rock and stone work, which he calls hardscaping.

Abernathy said Garden Hill is backed up two months with landscaping jobs, and Touchette said his landscaping business has been busier than it's been in any other year.

Ball's been busy, too. She and her daughter, Crystal, have been putting their time into their Melrose garden, amid the blooming viburnum shrubs and the perfume of lilac. When they moved into this house 13 years ago, Patty started a little garden of trees and shrubs in the front yard. Over the past decade plus, the lush greenery and stone walkways of her garden have enveloped the house.

Patty said it takes 16 years for a garden to develop the mature look she's striving for. In the meantime, she and her husband, Steve, have purchased two lots that adjoin Patty's garden to the southwest. She plans to expand her horticulture queendom of carpet roses and creeping phlox onto that ground, which now stands bare.

"They say your garden is a reflection of who you are," Patty said. "But I think someone else would have to tell me what my garden says about me."

trehagen@semissourian.com

335-6611, extension 137