From Extra-ordinary living magazine Fall 2023

Ross Collins | The Accidental Gardener

An example of good plants gone wild: the fleece flower and euphorbia on the left are overgrowing the rose and daylilies on the right.

Some people say children benefit from “a little tough love.” I don’t know about that, but I do know that my mother Dorothy argued for tough love in the garden. And it is easiest to get tough in the fall, she wrote in a 1965 article. “I wonder if we aren’t a little more courageous about these things in the fall,” she observed, “than in the spring when the awakening earth deceives us with its promise.”

Getting tough on our plants in September and October can begin gradually as we simply clean, prune, divide and move. Houseplants probably need our attention before we pull them back to their winter purgatories inside our dry houses. Dorothy advocated we begin with the hose, spraying the houseplants to clean and, if an inspection proves it necessary, consider pesticide before bringing inside. Prune to shape houseplants that have put on some gangly growth. Repot if needed, no more than one pot size larger.

That’s not so tough. But Dorothy suggested that, when necessary, we move more aggressively. “Maybe some of the plants look pretty mangy; instead of finding a place for them indoors, perhaps it would be best to take cuttings and start new plants.” That may make us feel less guilty, because the next step is drastic: “Maybe one would be better off tossing them away. Nursing along a sorry-looking plant is more work in the home than outdoors.”

Sentimental? Okay, admitted Dorothy, but “it probably isn’t worth it.” (And yet I feel sorry for my sorry-looking plants and take them in anyway. Be kind to horticultural misfits. My mother would scoff.)

In the perennial beds we can take on chores in the fall that will leave us less to do during what seems to be invariably a busy spring. “For example, many perennials can be divided in the fall. When dividing, discard the center woody part, and use the vigorous outer parts.”

Also worth a fall effort: moving plants growing in the wrong place or too close to something else.

 But at some point, Dorothy wrote, it’s just time to get tough out there too. “If you’ve had a plant or a shrub not doing well for you for a couple of seasons in spite of good care, this is the time to take it out,” she advised. “Be brave—if they haven’t done anything this summer with all its moisture, they never will—get rid of them. Space is too precious, especially in the small city yard. (I hope I take my own advice.)”

More commonly, at least for some of us, is the too-much mistake. That is, we fill the space with abundant small plants that grow to take over. “If you’ve got too much of something and it’s overrunning the place, thin it out,” recommended Dorothy. “Give some away, of you can find some willing recipients, or discard it. (I hope I take my own advice.)”

The idea of keeping a garden under firm control may sound harsh, Dorothy admitted, but that is not the point. “There must be a constant flow of things being added and subtracted,” she wrote, “or else the whole thing will get away from you, and you will have a mass of stuff, some sick, some unkempt, the aggressive ones overpowering the more gentle things.”

And did Dorothy take her own advice? As often as she could, but I know less often than she would have liked. And, as it turns out, my gardens have ended up much the same way. Maybe this fall I’ll finally dig out that forsythia that hasn’t bloomed in years. (I hope I take my own advice.)

Editor’s note: Dorothy Collins wrote a weekly garden column for the Fargo-Moorhead community from 1957 until 2008. Her son Ross, who grew up in Moorhead but now lives in Fargo, is a professor of communication at North Dakota State University. But he also tries his best to keep up his flower beds and gardens in his south Fargo home in the Hawthorne neighborhood. He calls himself the accidental gardener because while gardening was never really his hobby, he did learn a lot as his mother dragged him from flower show to show and nursery to nursery as a kid.