I'm Jen and I'm a bit of a plant hoarder.
The following may be factually inaccurate- but I think that plant people tend to fall into 2 major groups; landscapers and gardeners. The landscaper group considers the garden as a sum of its parts. The overall aesthetic is what matters and plants that no longer fit the aesthetic are evicted. Plants are only purchased if they will fit in with the existing theme and plan. The gardener on the other hand is plant focused. Instead of asking a question like, 'What plant will improve this location the most?' the gardener instead finds a plant they like and then tries to find a spot for it that works. It's plant first, overall appearance second. Of course, then you get the various subsets within those groups.
I'm a gardener. Don't get me wrong, it would be nice if the overall aesthetic worked. I would like that, but that priority is a distant second to "yay, what a cool plant, I need this plant." I don't know where my paths are going to be. I stick things in the ground and then go, 'oh shoot, a path would have been nice here'. Or, huh, how in the world am I going to reach in to weed this later? I don't follow the rules. Last year, I used weed barrier to solarize my lawn- after I had already stuck roses in it. Was it a great first year? No, no it was not. I don't know if you've ever tried to weed barrier over grass around roses that are sort of buried in the grass, but I actually don't recommend that although it really did mostly work. It turns out it is much, much easier to spread your weed barrier nice and flat to solarize your grass BEFORE you plant the plants. How about that. I'm trying that this year. A bit of planning ahead. Of course, what I acquired this year has outpaced what I solarized so I'm frantically spreading more weed barrier in hopes of having some more places ready for fall planting.
My main focus was roses. I believe I have around 250 or so different kinds as of July 1st, 2025. I had a gleeful first couple of years than found out about rose diseases and started to panic and diversify. The big scary in the rose world is Rose Rosette Disease which can decimate a collection quickly and is spread on the breeze by mites that just let go and float on the air spreading the loathsome disease from infected plant to fresh, new plant. I had a scare which was thankfully just herbicide damage but, I realized very suddenly that having all your plants in one species is a big mistake to make and bad for preventing disease spread and so on.
This year I started focusing more on adding other plants- peonies, irises, dahlias, various perennials started from seed. That way if one species gets impacted badly by disease, at least I'll have something else to enjoy. Of course, if you are familiar with dahlias, you are probably laughing right now because there is probably no worse plant to grow if you are stressed about disease than dahlias.
I was never interested in dahlias, they were a bit too popular. Everybody had them. The people who had them seemed a bit obsessed and I just didn't want that drama in my life. Anyhow, then I won a pack of free ones and then I found facebook groups and cheap tubers and now I have too many of those. AND they are so stressful I can't even consider that one day my roses might get RRD because I'm too busy wondering if that tiny yellow spot on the bottom leaf of one of my dahlias is going to end up being Tomato Spotted Wilt Virus. Of course, only found out about diseases after I already had acquired a whole bunch of tubers- so we'll see how long I stick with dahlias.
That brings me around to irises which I started buying when I found out that dahlias were stressful and so far I think just checking for Iris Borer seasonally is fine and low stress. We'll see.
Anyhow, I think most of my posts will just be a brief, 'this is what I did today'. Some might be entertaining. Some might be like reading a cereal box.
