Garden Witchery (10 page)

Shady or Moonlight Garden Layout

1 Hosta

2 Impatiens

3 Lady's Mantle

4 Columbine

5 Foxglove

6 Ferns

7 Lily of the Valley

8 Forget-me-nots

If you have sunny gardens and would like to try growing a moonlight garden, try these annual plants: geraniums, cleome, allysum, stock, cosmos, and white and yellow zinnias. Just to make things interesting, try adding dark purple petunias—not for their color, for their fragrance. You won't be able to see those velvety-looking purple blooms at night, but trust me, you won't have to. The fragrance they pump out after sundown will lead you right to them every time. Want to try a fragrant blooming shrub? The white variety of the lilac is another sunny garden option. Here is a tip: All varieties of blooming plants that are white will have the term
alba
behind the name.

For a night-fragrant blooming bulb, try the perfumed fairy lilies (
Chlidanthus fragrans
) and Madonna lilies (
Lilium candidum
). The Madonna lily is an excellent magickal plant, with the attributes of protection and breaking love spells. The flower is also sacred to the Lady.

For an easy to grow perennial, try other varieties of daylilies (
Hemerocallis
). Hit the nursery early in the season, before Mother's Day, for the best selection. Many daylilies are fragrant, and the paler the color, the more they will stand out in your moonlight garden. Look for these varieties: Green Ice, a pale yellow flower with a green throat; Fairy Tale Pink, a pink flower with a pale green throat; Happy Treasure, a yellow and rose-pink mixture, and Java Sea, a neon-yellow bloom with an acid-green throat. For the magickal associations, match up the colors of the blooms with your
Flower Color Magick Chart
.

Nicotiana (pronounced
niko-SHEE-anna
), the flowering tobacco, has a pale green variety that is very aromatic at night. These star-shaped annuals are another beloved flower that I add to my gardens every year. Nicotiana will last until frost and requires only occasional dead-heading to keep them blooming at their peak all summer long. If the flower production fades, cut them back to the leaves and they will shoot up again and bloom with more vigor. Also available in reds and pinks, try to get as many of the white and pale green as you can find. Your nose will be glad that you did. Nicotiana's magickal qualities are healing and purification.

Pale climbing roses, such as New Dawn, are a bewitching choice to climb over an arbor. A lovely ivory-pink color, climbing New Dawn is rated one of the best climbers for the Midwest region. Other climbing vines include the white clematis, wisteria, honeysuckle, and night-blooming jasmine. Any of these would be gorgeous alternatives.

It is with flowers as with moral qualities;
the bright are sometimes poisonous,
but I believe never the sweet.

Park Benjamin, American Editor
(1809‒1864)

Shady Characters and Poisonous Plants

Some of my favorite cottage garden plants for the moonlight/shade garden are, unfortunately, poisonous: lily of the valley, moonflower vine (
Impomea alba
), and white and yellow foxgloves. I bided my time and waited until my kids were older before I planted these. You may want to do the same. There is a list of poisonous plants at the end of this section.

The first year we grew moonflower vines in the garden, all of the neighborhood kids started hanging out in the backyard to watch the moonflowers bloom. Every night at dusk the kids would show up to watch them open. Some evenings it would be just my family on the back patio enjoying the show. Other nights we had anywhere from six to a dozen kids and their assorted lawn chairs spread out across the garden. (And yes, the kids were supervised.) I even had a neighbor videotape the six-inch blooms as they shuddered open one evening.

As the moonflowers start to unfurl, they tremble and quiver. Before your eyes they slowly open up, like in a time-lapse special effect. The scent is haunting and downright enchanting. On an interesting note, moonflowers will attract both hawk moths and luna moths to your garden.

Moonflower vines are something that we continue to grow every year. (As I have no toddlers running amok through the garden, the moonflowers are safe enough for growing up the privacy fence.) If one of my young nieces or nephews should arrive, they are never left unsupervised in the garden anyway.

Another fascinating plant is the datura or angel's trumpet (
Datura inoxia
subspecies). This is a gothic witch garden plant, with a capitol
G
for gothic and grim. It is an absolutely extraordinary night-scented flower, but I want to warn you to
be careful
with this plant! They are incredibly poisonous.

As a young gardener who didn't know any better, I once bought a home-grown shade plant from a vender at a flea market. He had photographs of it in bloom and he told me that the plant was called a “moonflower bush.” Captivated with my find, I planted it in my shade garden, fertilized it, and watched. As the summer progressed, it started to form huge trumpet-shaped buds.

The first time that it bloomed was on the night of a full moon. Excited by the timing, I checked on it periodically throughout the evening to discover that the flower had an amazingly heady, musky-lemony fragrance. It was so strong that it made my stomach turn over, and it immediately made me suspicious. I sat down in the garden and had a little chat with this two-foot plant. My shade gardens are behind a privacy fence and under old maple trees, so I settled there under the full moon, alone and unobserved.

I closed my eyes and held my hands out over the blooms and asked (in my mind) for the plant to tell me who it really was. The answer that came into my mind was just one word . . .
death
. I fell over backward in my haste to get away from the plant and scooted away from a safe distance of three feet to stare at it.

“Okay,” I said to myself, as my heart pounded hard in my throat, “that was different.”

I had never had anything like that happen to me before. I wanted another opinion. So, after a few moments, I called all the kids outside and showed them the plant. I told them nothing of my “discovery” and asked them what they thought about it. My kids are usually a fool-proof barometer if something is wrong, whether it's people or situations. To my consternation all three of them frowned and two of the three made no move to touch it. My second son started to reach out and then yanked his hand away at the last moment. (He's the one with the most pronounced psychic abilities, I might add.) They all told me immediately that they didn't like it. Since the children were young at that time, I warned all three of them to stay away from it until I could correctly identify this “moonflower bush.” I then herded everyone inside to wash their hands, just in case.

The next day I headed to the library and hit the books. To my dismay I discovered that my moonflower bush was actually a datura. All parts of this plant—flowers, leaves, and seed pods—are extremely toxic. It was even in capital bold-faced letters in all the books: ALL PARTS OF THIS PLANT ARE DEADLY. Damn. Well, I learned my lesson. So much for buying unmarked flowers. It was a lovely plant and I didn't want to just kill it. I kept the kids away from it and then when it started to fade and set seed pods, I used surgical gloves and ripped the plant out and disposed of it inside of a few garbage bags. I had my husband carefully apply a weed killer on the area, just in case I missed anything.

The other perennials eventually crept back in but, to this day, nothing will grow in the original spot where the datura was planted. After a while I planted an oak leaf hydrangea shrub (
Hydrangea quercifolia
) in the area. Its off-white, cone-shaped blooms are an accent to the shade/moonlight garden, as are its orange leaves in the fall. One of my favorite blooming shrubs, this hydrangea has grown well and it now covers up the bare spot. Magickally, you may use the bark of hydrangeas to ward off negativity and for hex breaking.

For more shady/moonlight garden perennials, try campanula, pale yellow daffodils, snowy white tulips, snowdrops, spiderwort, the pearly astilbe Snowdrift, and white phlox. Some other varieties of herbs that will thrive in shade are angelica, which will grow best for you in part shade, as will mallows and catnip. As mentioned before, pastel impatiens and white begonias are charming additions, as they will stand out well at night in a shady bed. Silver lamb's ears and the white-edged hosta are also good choices. Chartreuse shades of the hosta are an option for foliage that will glow after sundown. Finally, to accent your moonlight garden, string up a strand of white lights to add a magickal sparkle.

Poisonous Garden Plants

By no means is this list all inclusive, it is only meant to be informative. There are many other poisonous plants that are not represented here. If you are interested in pursuing this topic further, check with your local botanical garden or call your county's Master Gardeners for more information. Also, there are several excellent “Poisonous Plants” websites available to you on the Internet. Some of the best are from Cornell University, North Carolina State University, and Pennsylvania University.

If situations occur where poisoning concerns exist, then I recommend contacting a poison control hotline right away. The National Poison Control Hotline (for adults and children) is 1-800-222-1222. This number will connect you to your local hotlines. The National Animal Poison Control Center's number is 1-888-426-4435.

Please note the * denotes popular landscaping shrubs that are toxic when eaten in large quantities.

Amaryllis

American holly

Azaleas

Angel's trumpet (
Datura
)

Baby's breath

Baneberry

Belladonna

Blackberry lily

Bleeding heart

Bittersweet

Bouncing bet (seeds are toxic)

Burning bush *

Caladium

Chinese lantern

Clematis

Coleus

Crocus (all parts)

Daffodils

Daphne (berries are toxic)

Datura

Delphinium, a.k.a. larkspur

Dock

Dutchman's breeches

Flax

Four o'clock

Foxglove

Helleborus

Niger

Hyacinth

Hydrangea *

Great lobelia, cardinal flower

Iris (rhizomes)

Jack-in-the-pulpit

Japanese honeysuckle (berries)

Lantana

Lily of the valley

Lobelia

Monkshood (
Aconite
), a.k.a. wolf's bane

Moonflower (mildly toxic)

Morning glories (mildly toxic)

Oak leaf hydrangea *

Oleander

Peace lily

Plumbago

Poinsettia

Pokeweed (all parts)

Poppies

Rhubarb (the leaves)

Rue

Stonecrop (Sedum)

Snow-on-the-mountain

Sorrel

Star of Bethlehem (
Orithogalum umbellatum
)

Sweet pea

Tobacco

Tomato (foliage )

Trumpet creeper

Virginia creeper (highly toxic)

White snakeroot

Windflower

Wisteria

Yew

Who loves a garden still his Eden keeps,
Perennial pleasures plants,
And wholesome harvest reaps.

Amos Bronson Alcott

Samhain/Harvest Pumpkin Garden

Here are some tips and tricks that I have learned over the years while growing pumpkins, gourds, and Indian corn. My husband, kids, and I have been raising pumpkins and fall ornamentals for years. We select the ones we want for ourselves and then we invite all of our nieces and nephews over (at last count there were fifteen of them) to choose their pumpkins. My sisters-in-law pick from the gourds, mini pumpkins, and corn to decorate their homes. See a sample garden layout on
page 88
.

In late September, my kids set up a little pumpkin stand in the front yard and then sell their harvest to the neighborhood families for Halloween. We don't make a huge amount of money, they do it for fun. I split the profit in half, and divide it between the three of them and let them spend the first half however they want. The other half of the money is put away for Yule, for their gift exchange with each other.