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Pass-Along Gardening: Elaborate garden grew out of spirit of sharing
Journal Photo by Lauren Carroll
Robin McBride stands for a portrait in her garden. She said that when she started, the lawn was a blank slate. Her husband, Scott, said he has much less to mow these days.
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Published: July 18, 2009
Scott McBride is losing his lawn.
"Five years ago I mowed from the edge of that street to the edge of the woods," he said.
But five years ago, he married Robin McBride -- and the gardening began.
Slowly the expansive lawn has turned into patches of grass between large gardens filled with flowers, vegetables and herbs.
"It was a blank slate when I moved here," Robin McBride said. She moved here after living in Boston and New York, knowing little about gardening in the South, to take care of her parents, Ed and Lois Clark.
Her sprawling gardens in Lewisville wrap around buildings and border fences, line sidewalks and decorate the drainage ditch below the mailbox.
Robin McBride, who is a senior caregiver and makes and designs hats and historic dresses, is a big advocate of do-it-yourself, pass-along gardening. Her entire collection has been gathered from friends' gardens and started from seed.
She has learned a great deal on the Gardenweb.com site. The site has forums to share information with other North Carolina gardeners. She also connected with a group that exchanges plants and seeds at regular swaps.
"We get about 10 people for a seed swap, but the plant swaps bring about 50 people together. People come from Raleigh, Chapel Hill and Charlotte to the plant swap."
The plant swap is held twice a year in spring and fall at an outdoor pavilion in Oak Hollow Park in High Point. Robin McBride is not shy about meeting other gardeners.
"When I am riding down the road and see a nice garden, I will take note of the address and send a note. Gardeners almost always want to share their gardens with others."
In the McBride garden, everything is recycled. Weeds and spent flowers are uprooted and dropped in piles in the paths to serve as mulch. City leaves serve as compost. Even the Japanese beetles are fed to the McBrides' two American Australorp chickens.
Robin McBride takes a plastic bowl full of water to the garden and knocks the beetles into it. Then she delivers the meal to the chickens where they pop them right out of the water quick as a wink.
The chickens also get spent fruit from the strawberry plants and other garden waste. Their waste, in turn, is sent to the compost pile, where it will serve as valuable fertilizer. Each of the two chickens produces an egg a day.
Robin McBride built the chicken coop herself from recycled lumber. It has a place where the chickens can safely be locked up at night, out of the way of predators. She planted cockscomb, hens and chicks near the coop as a kind of inside gardener's joke.
Her shaggy white cat, Iggy, also helps in the pest-control department by keeping down the voles and mice. She makes little tents out of scrap pieces of lathe that she can erect over plants that have been moved to protect them from the sun so they will not wilt.
Besides gardening and carpentry, Robin McBride makes her own clothes and decorative hats festooned with flowers.
There are vegetables mixed in with the many flowers in the garden. A trellis has Kentucky Wonder pole beans. It works great because the beans are easily visible as you stand beneath it.
Another trick that the McBrides have discovered is growing potatoes under a cover of straw. The potatoes are cut so that each piece has at least one "eye" or bud.
The pieces are laid on the ground. A piece of fencing is wrapped around the area about 3 feet tall. Then the potatoes are covered with straw to the top of the fencing, using about a half of a bale.
"I don't fertilize, and I don't water," Robin McBride said. At harvest time, she slips her hand beneath the straw and feels around for a potato.
She said she thinks that everybody should be planting the cold-hardy annuals and perennials that grow so easily from seed in the South.
Her garden is full of plants heavy with ripening seeds. She waits until the capsules are dry and the seed rattles inside before collecting it and putting them into individual envelopes for replanting and to trade with other gardeners.
"Now is the time to sow these seeds so they can grow and make it through the winter," she said.
These plants will create a stunning show in next year's spring garden, but they will remain small and nondescript throughout the remainder of this year.
Robin McBride showed pictures of her garden in its full spring glory with towering foxgloves and larkspurs, sweet Williams, catchfly, poppies and hollyhocks -- all started from seed sown at this time of year.
It was a way to cover a lot of ground with a beautiful show and not have to pay a cent for it. One corner of the yard is occupied with plants that she had dug that were potted for trade, a variety of perennials and shrubs that would go to the plant swap. They are part of the give-and-take that make this a garden built on a shoestring budget.
■ A list of some cold-hardy annual and biennial flowers found in the McBrides' garden that can be grown from seed started in the summer and early fall. All of the flowers will bloom the following spring:
• Sweet Williams: 11/2 feet high, pink, white, red balls of flowers, usually fragrant.
• Foxgloves: 3 feet, white, rose, pink tubular flowers in spikes.
• Catchfly: 2 feet, brilliant pink flowers in clusters.
• Peony poppies: Large, frilly flowers in pink and salmon tones.
• Larkspur:3 feet, slender spikes of flowers in white, lavender and deep purple blue.
• Forget-me-not: 1 foot, sky-blue flowers.
■ If you have a gardening question or story idea, write to David Bare in care of Features, Winston-Salem Journal, P.O. Box 3159, Winston-Salem, N.C. 27101-3159, or send e-mail to his attention to gardening@wsjournal.com.
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