Wet Summer, Pond Fad
Push Gardeners to Bogs

Oct. 22, 2003 -- Most gardeners were cringing at the flooding rains that came with Hurricane Isabel, but not Nita Sankpal. She had just put a bog garden in the corner of her Canton, Mich., yard this spring, including cardinal flowers and a "Surprise lily" with neon blue and pink flowers -- that all need to be drenched by water. "When the clouds came, I thought 'bring it on,' " she says.

So much for the cacti. Gardeners may have spent the past couple of years seeking drought-ready plants, but recent wet weather has some folks looking into a lesser-known niche -- bogs. With green-thumbs already planning for next season, garden centers are pitching soggy gardening, with MasterGardening.com seeing sales of its "select bog plant collection" up 30% this year and Lazy S'S Farm in Barboursville, Va., promoting plants like a pink "Hot Lips" Turtlehead that can survive prolonged dunking. And Lilypons Water Gardens, a Maryland firm that sells marsh and pond plants, says customers actually waded through its hurricane-flooded lot for its recent half-off sale. "Most people are trying them for the first time," says assistant general manager Sean Titus.

A soggy summer hasn't hurt the bog movement, of course, with showers on the East Coast and, most recently, Isabel dropping rain as far west as Michigan. It's also getting a boost from one of last year's big fads, backyard ponds, many of which have minimarshes sprouting up along the edges. But now even some gardeners without ponds are finding a low, damp spot in the yard for plants that like "wet feet," like Joe Pye weed and fragrant Lizard's Tail (it smells like lavender). Other big sellers? Muck boots and mud gloves, moisture meters and rain barrels. In all, sales of bog and pond plants and related products have grown 49% in the last two years, to $1.4 billion, according to the National Gardening Association.

Nothing Simple

Granted, there's nothing simple about putting in a backyard bog -- it involves a hole in the yard and rubber liners, then gravel and topsoil mixed with sphagnum moss. Then come the plants: Although some bog collections go for about $45 (including irises and aquatic mints), it can cost hundreds for a display of fancier flowers, including carnivorous pitcher plants and bog orchids, plus specimens like the Amorphophallus, or Voodoo lily, which smells like rotten flesh (Cost: $29).

And if you don't like the final effect? Because these plants thrive in acidic soil, bog-weary gardeners not only have to rip everything out to improve drainage, but add lime to neutralize the soil. The plants are hardly foolproof, either. Because they dwell on the edges of waterways, they're used to the ebb and flow of tides and need to dry out occasionally or their roots will rot. Wanda Tate discovered that the hard way. When rain waterlogged her garden -- which includes more than 200 bog plants -- she had to dig up her favorites and rinse their roots with a weak bleach solution before replanting them. But considering that some of these plants cost as much as $30 apiece, "it was well worth it," says the Alger, Mich., graphic artist.

While bog gardening is still a small niche, it does show how much the recent shifts in climate have helped the gardening business sell all sorts of new plants. After all, it was just last year that many garden centers throughout the East pushed "xeriscape" gardens (with sedum, cactus and yucca) to cope with that year's prolonged drought. In the usually damp Pacific Northwest, meanwhile, this summer has been uncharacteristically dry -- and Seattle's Magnolia Garden Center reports sales of drought-resistant plants like rock roses, lavender and hebe, an evergreen shrub, are up 20%. In all, the gardening industry has grown 19% during the past two years to almost $40 billion, according to the National Gardening Association.

Naturally, this whipsawing weather and gardening fashions have some people throwing up their hands. Christine Robertson, of Mercer Island, Wash., figured a bog garden would be just the thing for her region's wet weather, and so three years ago she put in arrowhead plants, irises and multicolored "chameleon" plants. At first they flourished, but now she's watching them crisp in one of the driest seasons on record. "I don't want any new stuff," says the physician. "I'm afraid it will keel over."

Reading the 'Farmer's Almanac'

To some degree, even the industry is having trouble deciding what to do next. As weather patterns have become weirder across the country -- 1998, 2001 and 2002 were the three warmest years on record, according to the Environmental Protection Agency -- some stores say they're struggling to figure out what to buy for their springtime inventories. In Sante Fe, N.M., David Salmen has been selling xeriscape collections for almost a decade, but after sales slowed this summer he's cutting back. (He's planning to emphasize a "Colors and Textures" collection, $127, that can handle a deluge.) In Baltimore, Green Fields Nursery and Landscaping is stocking up on swamp-dwelling red twig dogwoods instead of rhododendrons. "I'm watching the weather, reading the 'Farmer's Almanac,' and hoping I'm right," says general manager Peter Bieneman.

Still don't know what to plant? There's always Fred Bess's approach. During the past three years, the landscape manager's two-acre property in Parma, Ohio, has been hit by successive seasons of drought and rain. Sick of replanting, last year he planted his front yard with a dry garden that includes palms and cacti. Out back, he has two bog gardens with Venus flytraps and poison sumac ("for color"), and, in the rain barrel, a carnivorous bladderwort to keep the mosquitoes down. Now, no matter what the weather, some parts of his yard look straggly and struggling -- and others look lush. "I'm hedging my bets," he says.

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