My Garden Consultant

My inner garden designer came over one night last summer. She's smart, talented, knows plants, understands my climate, and is a keen design critic. It was well after midnight when she visited, but she got my attention. 

I woke up to her chatter --

Edit. Edit. You've got too many busy things going on. You know that, right?

Ella, what should I take out? (Her name is Ella, she's vaguely Hispanic but not from around here.) What needs editing?

The birdbath garden. You have a thick circle of creeping thyme under that turquoise birdbath, but you chopped it up and dug into it to plant flower things. Now you got no-good spindly flowers in a circle of no-good chopped up groundcover. What. Either one or the other. (Her accent is Brooklynese, but she didn't grow up there.)

Okay Ella. Okay. What should I do? It looked promising before I interplanted more things with the thyme. I thought perennials planted in thyme could work.

What? No, no. Take out the perennials you stuck in there, and the others you added later: the orange agastache (nice, but really?) and the gone-by blackeyed Susans (why can't you even with those?) and the tall blue Texas salvias (those are nice) and let the carpet of thyme be the sole garden element under the birdbath.

Um, all right. 

You understand, of course that you can NOT grow plants within a blanket of thyme. What were you thinking? Did you even look this up? The thyme outcompetes everything. That's how it creeps. Hello, "creeping" thyme? This is terrible, cherie. (I don't think she is French, but I don't know).

I know, Ella. I struggle to cut away the encroaching creeping thyme and I struggle to keep the perennials watered, and this whole combination never worked. Looked nice, though, when the taller upright flowers gathered around the birdbath. One year the blanketflowers were great.

Yeah, yeah. They didn't come back, though did they? Did they? (Her accent gets thicker at night, I notice.)

No, Ella, they  wouldn't regrow when the thyme greened up in spring and the blanketflowers gave up.

See? Am I right? So plant all your flowery things -- that salvia and that orange agastache  -- somewhere else. Let your outer ring around this garden be the floozy, let the birdbath be centered in a low, dignified thyme carpet, nothing else. 

(Ella's from another era that knew what floozy meant. She doesn't look old, though, in fact she looks a little floozy herself in garden pants and a way too tight t-shirt I'm pretty sure she got off Amazon that says I Wet My Plants. I don't make this up.)

Ella, yes. Yes, I will do that. You are right. I'll take out the flowers and let the thyme be a carpet under the birdbath. I'll put those nice tall flowers elsewhere. You'll help me decide where, right?

Are you paying me for a re-design? You got no space here and you want me to relocate a bunch of tall flowery things somewhere for you? Get some sleep, I have other clients to consult with.

I pay her too much but her hours are convenient.