A Garden in the Carolinas

Container gardening around the Southeast

Not my garden, but prettier: wild crimson clover and cornflowers along the side of the road in South Carolina

When we left the house and garden in Portland at the end of 2022 I didn’t know if I’d have any sort of garden for a long time, and I tried to put it out of my mind. I was still mourning the old one, but it was also the holidays and I was glad to be able to spend time with my family for the first time since before the pandemic. I usually don’t think about gardening much during the Christmas season anyway. But that changes as soon as the holidays are over, and when everybody else is talking New Year’s resolutions I’m already taking out my big ziploc bag of seeds and dreaming of spring.

I spent the month of January in a little house situated in a wooded and hilly neighborhood in Asheville, North Carolina. It had a backyard—also hilly—terraced up to a deck and cut flower patch, but of course it was winter and there weren’t any flowers until the hellebores came out. Sometimes it even snowed. I stayed inside with Peep, sitting in front of an electric fireplace, getting pulled deeper and deeper into the alluring algorithm of Garden YouTube.

I’ll have to do another post about my favorite gardeners on YouTube. I follow some YouTubers who run flower farms or have big country estates, but while I was in Asheville I wanted to find different sorts of gardeners with different sorts of gardens. We still weren’t sure what our future living situation would be or what we’d be able to grow, so I wanted to learn more about growing in containers and having a garden that might have to be portable for a while.

Also not my garden: a snowy Asheville cut flower patch in January

One of my favorite YouTube gardener’s, HeeYoung, has a small yard in a suburb of Seoul, where she grows both in the ground and in containers. I’m fascinated by Korean gardeners and the beautiful plant nurseries they have (again, maybe another future post!). English-style cottage gardening—the type I love best—seems to be very fashionable there, though in the cities it’s certainly done on a much smaller scale. HeeYoung has a garden full of David Austin roses but also a substantial collection of perennials and annuals grown in little pots, ornate and rustic. I hadn’t had much experience with growing in containers at the time, but watching her videos made me excited about the possibilities of it. So much prettier than I had realized.

I loved the idea of a flower garden consisting of pots. And as soon as I could I ordered two scented geraniums online, an ‘Attar of Roses’ and a ‘Nutmeg.’ They were small and definitely portable, and the first plants in my new kind of garden. But most of all I loved what they symbolized, because as long as I had a couple of plants I had a garden. I will say that my next plant purchase, a David Austin ‘Carding Mill,’ wasn’t quite as portable, though I did lug it in its big plastic pot to the backyard of almost every monthly rental we stayed in.

My traveling container garden, complete with the ‘Carding Mill’ rose and ‘Attar of Roses’ scented geranium

Back in South Carolina the next month, I was at my sister Lauren’s house, helping her plot out her garden, when I decided to go to Lowe’s and buy some seed starting supplies. We were staying in an Airbnb, but I went ahead and sowed a big tray with seeds I already had and bought some clip-on grow lights off of Amazon. I was determined to start growing something—I figured that even if I didn’t have a place of my own to grow in, I could at least have extra plants for my family members’ gardens.

So I grew in the Airbnb, and then when I stayed with my parents for a bit, I grew in their front guest room. The neighbors saw the grow lights through the window and jokingly would ask if I was growing marijuana. Maybe it was the Oregon license plate on our car? But, no! I was growing dahlias, tomatoes, cosmos, snapdragons, calendula, cerinthe, and nicotiana. Though honestly I do regret not growing cannabis when we lived in Oregon. It’s completely legal and would have been a good challenge!

All my seedlings taking over my parents’ screened-in porch (such a luxury for growing/hardening off!)

Anyhow, the seedlings quickly outgrew the guest room, so out they went to the screened-in porch, which in South Carolina in early spring was a perfect spot for them to grow. I’ve never had a screened-in porch before, and what a luxury it is! I’d drag the trays out onto the brick patio when it was warm enough, and drag them back in when it was a little too warm, which it usually was, even early on.

That was definitely the thing I wasn’t prepared for about gardening in the south. The same heat and humidity that made the crimson clover and cornflowers along the side of the roads and the native clematis along the wooded Swamp Rabbit trail I’d run along grow tall and strong also made some of the flowers I was growing go to seed early and peter out. The nicotiana hated the direct sun, the snapdragons loved the spring and hated the summer. I really didn’t know what I was doing, and probably should have planted earlier than I did. As I said before, there are definitely tips and tricks to growing beautiful flowers in the Southeast. I just don’t know them.

My sisters’ gardens: Lauren’s flower garden along the fence, and a dahlia grown by my brother-in-law, Danny

But I still had a container garden full of flowers and more plants than I could grow myself. I planted some of the seedlings in my parents’ garden and gave some to my sisters and to the neighbors who thought I was growing illegal plants. A big part of the fun was getting photos of the flowers growing in other gardens. My brother-in-law Danny is a new-ish but very natural gardener, and his tomatoes looked a lot better than the ones I tried and failed to grow for my parents. My sister Lauren is very much into wildlife gardening so wasn’t a fan of deadheading her flowers, but that ended up being really helpful at seed-saving time.

My parents let me take over their raised bed for a cut flower patch. Some plants did better than others. Overall, we probably had the best luck with the dahlias, grown from a packet of Floret seeds, which honestly is the only way I’m going to be growing dahlias for the time being. There were dahlias of every color: pink, white, red, yellow. The snapdragons were happy in the spring, the cosmos were happy in the early summer, but then died away. The only two flowers that loved the South Carolina heat were the dahlias and zinnias, which kept going until November.

My parents’ cut flower garden: cerinthe, calendula, and a nasturtium in a pot; cosmos ‘Apricotta,’ cornflowers, calendula, zinnias, dahlias, and snapdragons in the raised bed

Of course, by then Drew and Peep and I were getting ready for our move up north. We spent September in Asheville, and this time around it was warm and beautiful, with flowers everywhere. Asheville really is a gardening town. It reminds me a lot of Portland with its streets of old craftsmen houses with waist-high flowers growing in the front yards. I even saw urban goats and chickens! Sow True Seed is located in Asheville, as well as botanical gardens and arboretums to visit. The Biltmore gardens, too, though we didn’t go there this time.

I wasn’t really growing much at this point, and the only one of my plants I brought along with me was a scented geranium. But in a way our stay in Asheville was a perfect bookend to my gardening experience in the Southeast. I watched the town go from grey and bleak in the winter to colorful and full of life in summer. And in South Carolina, where I ran the same routes over and over again, I watched bare trees fill up with blossom and tiny seedlings grow huge and then fade away. I was there for an entire growing season, and in November, my dad and I dug up the annuals from their cutting garden and cut down and mulched around the dahlias. Maybe they’ll even come back this year!

In May I’m going back to visit for my nephew’s wedding, and the goal is to bring more seedlings for my family. Because do I currently have two trays of seedlings under lights and already way more plants than I can possibly grow in my own garden? Yes!

Again, not my garden (unfortunately!): flowers around Asheville, NC

Garden Notes:

• Honestly a rainy, windy week here in New York, but I’m telling myself that all this rain is good for the garden. (At least I hope it is?)

• But last weekend was beautiful, and I managed to plant out the snapdragon babies and some calendula and scabiosa and silene.

• And fresh off the boat from Holland: my Breck’s order. I had a gift card that my parents gave me for my birthday back in 2022 and I finally used it on an echinacea, a geranium ‘Rozanne,’ and a purple phlox.

• I went to a pop-up plant sale put on by Gowanus Nursery and bought a wonderfully old-fashioned lavender primrose to put on the table for Easter, and once the weather warms up I’m going to put it outside. Finally, my garden will have some color!