What if Barbie designed a garden
Mass plantings in rows, by Vanessa Bucceri for Unsplash
If Barbie designed a flowerbed.
Barbie the movie opened July 21. Creators Greta Gerwig (director) and Noah Baumbach wrote the movie, which regales audiences with this super famous doll of high fashion and ornamentation—and of both past and current pop cultures.
By Tengyart for Unsplash
Parents of young kids may fear going, assuming they're in for a massive Barbie doll commercial. But it isn't. We're safe, at least mostly, from corporate manipulation here.
Satire runs freely in the film, but so do realism and philosophy.
Weird Barbie
Weird Barbie (Kate McKinnon of Saturday Night Live fame) is a main character in the movie. Someone has spent too many hours and too much energy playing with her. Someone(s) has crayoned her face, burnt her hair, over-flexed her joints.
Reminds me of my garden, which I have over neglected, -dug up, not fertilized enough, and in which I have planted the wrong things. Nasturtiums need a lot of sunlight!
I have consulted my mind's Gardening Barbie.
"Gardening Barbie" lends landscape design ideas
By Ellen Cramer. Mass planting in same color family.
So, if Gardening Barbie, available on Etsy and elsewhere, were to design a flower bed, what might it be?
The Barbie of decades ago, of course, would grow perfection. She would revel in symmetry, exotics, texture and balance. Maybe do something like an English or French garden. Today's Barbie, however, is free to go—and grow—wild. She certainly uses noninvasive- and local plants.
Mass plantings
Indiana University campus, near Eskenazi Museum of Art
Masses of same-colored flowers and other plants spill hue and texture over a landscape. Dramatic and dense, mass planting is just what it sounds like: grouping lots of similar looking species.
A mistake I make comes from too many choices in the catalogs and garden centers. I pop in for a flat of marigolds to be distracted by those white phlox over there and those purple dahlias over here. I'm learning to buy the marigolds, dozens of them. And plant them in masses. Deer turn up their whiskers at them, they smell like the good old days, and even though I've seen them a thousand times, I find them blindingly beautiful.
Then, another day or year, I return and get the phlox and the dahlias. But now I'm buying similar colors and growth heights, so that I can create one-color rows in a multi-color pattern. Much as Nature does.
By Ellen Cramer. Organize flowers by color in a vase, too.
Planting as Nature plants
Nature plants bountifully. What looks lonelier than a single row of tulips, marching like little soldiers? That's why designers plant them in "king's crosses," patterned squares.
Stroll the Indiana University campus to see the mass plantings there. At graduation time, they take the form of red and white row upon row of tulips. Lately, the pink and white begonia masses look almost like sunset lakes lining the walkways.
August planting!
You can still plant in August. According to Rosie Lerner for Purdue University, early this month lay down seeds of carrots, beets, kohlrabi, kale and snap beans. Plant lettuce, spinach, radishes and green onions later this month and early September. Thin out babies as needed.
Wildflower patches
A group of wildflowers is called a patch. You do need to do some prep, such as ridding the area of grass, with its circuitous root system. Wildflowers prefer uncultivated soil, so resist the manure and fertilizers.
As my horticulture professor, Dr. Richard Iversen, told us back at the State University of New York, "Never plant something if you don't know what it is or if you feel sorry for it. We hort students were always trying to save sickly saplings.
Avidly avoid invasives
"If I were about to buy a house and noticed Japanese knotweed in the yard, I would retract the offer," Dr. Iversen said. So, having the wildly spreading and invasive species in my own yard, I then advised my husband, "If I die, make sure you keep cutting back the knotweed!"
