Instant panache for new gardens

LITTLE ROCK — A brand-new garden is full of excitement, but like a new kitten, it lacks the grace and assurance of maturity. Although it takes a few years for plants to grow and for a garden to develop its character, there are things you can do to give even a new garden an aura of age and permanence.

Garden antiques give your garden instant history, even as new plants get their roots down. An old iron gate between spanking-new fence posts establishes a fine mood and lets visitors know that this is a garden where the past is part of the present and where handsome materials are appreciated. Weathered statues or flowerpots, dotted with moss and lichen, lend some easygoing aristocracy to a garden in its salad days.

Carol Dickey, owner of Pear Tree Design and Antiques, in Kansas City, Mo., furnished her new garden with antique urns, statues and crusty glazed flowerpots. Inspired by the French and English gardens Dickey loves but full of plants that flourish in the Midwest, the garden has grown up around her collection of ornaments. A tricolor beech tree is only now, after five years, beginning to provide the intended backdrop for a stunning and artfully placed statue.

Garden antiques often represent a substantial investment. A pair of large urns on matching plinths might cost several thousand dollars from an antiques dealer. So shop around. Aged terracotta flower pots, old watering cans and curious bits of architectural salvage can often be found for $100 or less. Rusty farm salvage, like tractor seats and milk cans,are also usually inexpensive, and they look just right by the gate to a vegetable garden or as a sculptural element in an herb garden. If the rusty patina doesn’t appeal to you, a quick coat of bright paint will put a fresh twist on tradition.

Shop at estate sales or flea markets for bargains, and don’t be too picky about condition. A good-looking urn doesn’t need to hold water, or even soil; set it on a stump among the roses, and it immediately becomes a handsome piece of sculpture.

The gardens around new houses in the suburbs often look as bleak as a plowed field in the rain. Jeff Lightbody, a gardener with an eye for natural and off-beat decoration, brought boulders of local volcanic rock into his new garden in Boise, Idaho, and had them arranged to look like a natural outcropping. Once they were inplace, he planted colorful perennial flowers to fill in the bare spots. For the patio right outside his back door, Lightbody chose a rich earthtinted concrete and had it stamped (with a rubber mat) to mimic the texture of stone. Gray concrete “is sad and depressing,” he says. “Life is too short for gray concrete.”

Lightbody’s collection of garden ornaments mostly comprises industrial pieces, such as the old rock-sifting screens from Boise’s quarries that he used as trellises around his patio. He planted ferns in an antique cast-iron sink. His antique garden tools, decorative spigot handles and industrial drill bits are as intriguing as flowers, and the rusty salvage pieces complement his garden’s palette. “I am a huge fan of rust,” he says. “That was the basis of the garden’s color scheme.”

Fast-growing morning glories, scarlet runner beans and other annual vines will cover a trellis in one year, Lightbody says, while perennial vines are just getting started. Evergreens contribute lush texture even while they’re small. To give your young garden plenty of color, plant flats of annual flowers in the bare spots between perennials for a year or two until the perennials fill in.

It’s tempting to invest in large trees to create instantshade, but big trees are expensive and not always practical, and they actually grow very slowly. They are also difficult to maneuver, and sometimes have to be planted with heavy equipment, leaving industrial tracks through the garden. Instead, buy small trees, and invest in a snappy striped umbrella for the patio table to provide shade while you enjoy your trees growing up and filling out into mature specimens.

Gardens are never really finished; there’s always something new to plant or a project to work on.