Gestalt Gardener
Something my horticulturist great-grandmother Pearl planted a century ago in her sprawling landscape is now being packaged as an exciting “new” garden feature.
She created a distinct garden “room” with a row of closely-spaced medium-size American holly trees, a nearly solid wall that didn’t need regular trimming like a clipped hedge or leaf raking like trees.
It’s now being called a “tredge” which is a newly-coined portmanteau of tree and hedge. It is simply an informal row of small trees or overgrown large shrubs, taller than a fence or hedge but not leggy like a row of big spreading shade trees.
This works well for folks needing something fast along a property line to screen unsightly views without tangling in overhead power lines, or to slow down cold winter winds, or provide a bit of higher-up backyard privacy in small-lot neighborhoods where lumbering trees just won’t fit.
I am occasionally amused whenever simple gardening practices are “discovered” by lofty-minded new devotees who brand them with new names and codify the obvious with complicated how-to guides.
Not knocking the general thrust of them; I’m on board with the ideas. But for decades my very simple leaf pile has effortlessly recycled leaves and garden and kitchen debris into rich soil amendment; I just don’t call it a compost system. For that matter I don’t refer to my cottage garden as “biointensive” even though I interplant lots of stuff together for all year benefits; nor do my scattered fruit trees make it a “forest garden.”
While I’m all for promoting good garden practices with names that make me look all fashionista, it’s sorta like referring to the long narrow strip where I drag limbs and branches as a dead-hedge, instead of a brush pile, then piling leaves on top and planting it later which I understand is now being called hügelkultur. My “pollinator garden” is just an overstuffed flower bed teeming with bees and butterflies. And though the earnest blogs about sustainable gardening are great, they are water-muddying; I’ve heard there are as many permaculture definitions as there are permaculturists.
Anyway, de facto tredges have been around awhile, just not celebrated as such. About 30 years ago my highly-acclaimed landscape architect friend Rick Griffin designed a Southern Living-worthy tredge outside the walls of an upscale Jackson neighborhood, using repeated groups of mixed plants.
A “cookie-cutter design” competitor, unable to think outside the boxwoods, once sniffed that the actually tasteful combination of plants looks like someone just shoved plants off the back of a truck, but now it is being promoted worldwide, as tredges are to be featured prominently month at London’s trend-setting Chelsea Flower Show.
Our gardens already feature medium to large landscape plants, often grown as standalone specimen or accents, which naturally fit this bill. Several already-familiar low-maintenance tredge-quality plants include evergreens like red cedar, little gem magnolia, wax ligustrum, camellias, sweet olive, wax myrtle, althaea (rose of Sharon), burgundy loropetalum, and several durable hollies: yaupon, American, and Foster’s hybrids. For wildlife-favoring lagniappe throw in an occasional flowering and fruiting small tree like parsley hawthorn, redbud, vitex, or chickasaw plum.
Knit these together underneath with berry-laden nandina, billowy spirea, azaleas, summer-blooming abelia, golden privet, oakleaf hydrangea, and dwarf palmetto as eye-catching contrasts in shapes, leaf textures, and seasonal flowers and berries.
It’s satisfying how Pearl’s still-thriving wall o’hollies and Rick’s glorious gallimaufry of small trees and large shrubs are now being fêted, while fitting easily into modern landscapes, especially with the newly-mainstreamed emphasis on urban wildlife and pollinators.
The trendsetters were just doing what made sense. Without needing a name for it.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.