A dead Daphne giraldii. It was doing fine, even last week, until one day it wasn’t. Just like that. Okay one day, then wilting, then this.
It’s only moderately annoying, since now I can’t say to myself, “I’ll plant this next to the daphne”, unless I remind myself that I now mean the other one, the one that’s still alive (as of this minute). I plan to get rid of most of the plants in this part of the garden anyway.
I didn’t plant either of them; they just appeared as seedlings, after the parent plants, and their offspring too, did the same thing. Got really big, flowered, and then died. That’s right: daphnes are weeds in the garden here. I pull them up all the time, but I left some plants of giraldii because they looked okay where they appeared.
Talk about a Dramatic Statement. And form, texture, structure, all that. I can’t really say anything about iteration, supposedly a necessary component of garden design, since one plant is alive and one is, all too obviously, not.
I’ve often wondered if making a garden full of nothing but dead plants might start a trend. (Had I started this when I began gardening here, I’d need about fifty acres by now…..) You spend money on a plant, it dies, and you throw it away, or toss it into the compost pile. Why not put it in a separate garden, with its departed companions?
The maintenance alone would make it worth the trouble.
the miserable gardener 