ON Friday evenings during the spring and summer, journeys of great optimism are repeated all over the country. City dwellers, eager to see what is happening in their weekend gardens, make their way up winding roads in the twilight. Once they’ve arrived, even the darkness won’t keep them from making the rounds they’ve been looking forward to all week. Who knows? It might be necessary to rescue a wilting plant, scare off a hungry animal, or merely mutter an expletive over a long-awaited flower that was in bud just a week ago but now, past its bloom, is nothing more than a limp dishrag.
More in Escapes
More articles on second homes and vacation destinations.
Scott Canning at his home. A weekend garden is “going to look the way it looks,” Mr. Canning says.
“Last night we were late leaving town and didn’t get to our house till 11 p.m., so I had my husband aim the car headlights into the garden,” Julie Hébert, a writer and director in Los Angeles, said of a recent visit to her Ojai Valley weekend place. “I couldn’t wait to see what was going on. I had to make sure that nothing needed my immediate attention.” From the eagerness in her voice, one imagines the car hadn’t yet come to a complete stop.
To Ms. Hébert and other ardent gardeners, the flower beds and vegetable plots of their second homes are a sublime refuge, a place to leave the workaday world behind. Outsiders might view these primarily untended plots as the weekend equivalent of work camps, full of a slate of catch-up chores and the unceasing demands of hundreds of little vegetative voices: water me, feed me, weed me, protect me. They’d be right. Second-home gardeners do have it rough.
Even under ordinary circumstances, the challenges of nurturing plants and controlling nature are all too well known to gardeners. But add the frequent absences of this kind of homeowner (five days out of seven equals almost three-quarters of the week spent away), and you have a recipe for impending disaster. During the height of the season, a missed visit can spell catastrophe.
Even with all the responsibility, these homeowners insist the rewards are great. And to help their gardens make it successfully through the week, they show up each weekend armed with an ever increasing list of hard-learned lessons and shortcuts. One of the essential elements for success is plant selection.
“I tell people that some things are just too fussy,” said Cristina Spindler, owner of Peconic River Herb Farm on the East End of Long Island. “I try to steer people away from plants like hydrangeas and vegetables since they take so much water.”
Ms. Spindler finds that most of her customers don’t want to garden all weekend; they want to relax. For those customers she recommends shrubs, especially broad-leaved evergreens like skimmia, aucuba, and variegated leucothoe. She also suggests plants with a long season of interest through their unusual foliage color or berries: brown physocarpus or the wide range of viburnums that bloom in the spring and have berries in the fall. “I also tell them to grow herbs if they’re into edible gardening,” she said. “They are so much more drought-tolerant. Just buy your vegetables at the farm stand.”
But some gardeners still want the challenge.
“SOMETIMES I think I bit off more than I can chew with my place,” Scott Canning said. And this is quite a statement coming from the director of horticulture at Wave Hill in the Bronx, one of America’s most masterfully planted gardens. “My standards are much higher than I can maintain being at my garden only two days a week. I have to tell myself, it’s going to look the way it looks — but I know I could never survive without it.”
Once at his Columbia County, N.Y., farmhouse on a Friday night, Mr. Canning likes to get out right away and do a tour of his fenced vegetable garden, tomato patch and long double flower borders. To accomplish this in the dark he has acquired an ingenious hands-free device — a backpacker’s headlamp that allows him to check on new developments and even do a little work well after dusk.
The next morning usually finds him out early. “My favorite time is dawn on Saturday,” Mr. Canning said. “I go out in my bare feet with a cup of coffee and start weeding, always the first task of the weekend. Before I know it, it’s noon.”