Note:  The Opperman have chosen to retire from  writing their monthly pieces for the Lake Houston Gardener after 12 years.  But with such a rich inventory, we have decided to share some of our favorite articles from the archives. This month, with the upcoming field trip to Enchanted Gardens Nursery, Gudrun talks about her  uncontrolled need to acquire new plants

“I am a Plantaholic”

So, you went to a plant sale or a garden center and came back with more plants than you intended, and more plants for which you have no place. Maybe you need to move something to make space for that new plant, and the plant you have to move is still blooming. Or maybe you just have so much to plant that you can’t get it all in the ground right away. It’s best to get things planted immediately, but you can’t. They just don’t look right in the garden where you envisioned them. ‘No problem’, you think, ‘I’ll find another place for them’.

I just can’t seem to stop buying plants, and perhaps making this public is the first step toward healing. I’ve run out of room in my own yard so my tendency, has escalated to casually planting them in other places.  But I really can’t afford to maintain this habit, particularly in this economy and when, at any given time, I have a little collection of plants “waiting for space to open up” and they die in the interim. 

Why plants? I love the endless variety of colors and textures, growth patterns, flowers, leaves, the challenge of creating a Garden of Eden to soothe my soul, not to mention growing our own food. What’s better than running outside to see what’s for dinner? Sometimes, after I’ve purchased several trays of plants from the nursery, I keep them in my car overnight (with the windows up) just because they make the car smell all tropical. I may also have some bags of mulch in the back, and then the car is positively woodsy with the aroma of rich fertile loam.  We won’t mention the odor of some wonderful organic fertilizer that adds to the mix.  Who wants that new car smell anyway?

How does it start?

Obsessive garden plant collectors (politely referred to as plants men/women/people) are a familiar phenomenon judging by references in garden magazines and programs.  The disease creeps up insidiously. There is the powerful urge to collect the ‘different’ or at least new to you.  This is how I ended up with twenty nine species of ferns, and seventeen begonia varieties (I’m over that phase now, but not entirely.  I did just purchase a red-leafed Rex Begonia.).  

You come across a plant in a garden or nursery or on Google while looking up something else, or on lists of plants offered at upcoming plant sales. “Oh that’s rather nice, I wonder if there are any other varieties? “What, three pages of them!” So you pick three or four of the cheaper ones more or less at random.  And they do seem to do well in your garden. So next time you order some plants, you include one or two….. At some point you can’t remember which you planted where, so you make a note before the labels vanish forever (somewhere there is a lost plant label repository, along with all those odd socks). And then you find to your surprise you have a dozen or two, or more.  At which point the urge to ‘complete’ the collection surfaces and you stop even looking at the prices (unless they are totally absurd) when you find a new one. You order things you don’t really want that much, just to make up a minimum order containing that one last elusive plant.  

So, what’s wrong with it?

Of course the symptoms are at their worst when you start a new garden. There seems so much space to fill. It is easy to forget how soon it fills, especially if you want to keep a bit of open space to fill with plants at a later date. I used to keep a list of all the plants I bought – an alarming exercise. To put some sort of limit, I would calculate how much a smoker or drinker would spend per month/year and try not to exceed it. Just one little vice is OK, right? The database (yes I kept databases) of things I planted here, including a number of failures and some duplicates, desperately needs updating.  Oh well, I don’t really want to know how this disease is progressing.  I hear that another symptom of this progressive disease is called ‘Shrinking Lawn Disorder’.  But then, who needs to water a useless lawn, when one can plant some more plants on one’s lists of must-haves?

P.P.D. aka Plant Procurement Disorder, Plantaholic, whatever you call it, you can’t be a real plant lover without it.  My name is Gudrun, and I am a plantaholic.  It is probably incurable; no hope for it.

“What do you mean there is no more room in that bed to put it?”