I’ll be happy if the flowers I planted over the weekend do well, but if that does happen It probably won’t have much to do with my gardening abilities. The summer in coastal Maine is just about the perfect climate for growing flowers and other plants: it’s not too hot, so the soil doesn’t dry out like it often does during a broiling Midwestern summer, it rains every few days (and often with real gullywashers) so there’s lots of water for the plants, heavy morning dews are commonplace, too, and there’s plenty of sunshine. Basically, Maine supplies everything the native flowers need — if you just leave them be.
As a result, flowers seem to grow pretty much everywhere, on their own. The lupines that are framing the harbor in the picture above are thriving In an untended area off the berm of a very busy street. And the lupines and the other wildflowers in the photo below are growing in profusion in a huge area that presumably isn’t being actively weeded and watered by a human gardening crew.
So what does it all mean? It means that if I can’t grow flowers here, I’m undoubtedly the world’s worst gardener.