Love's Not the Only Battlefield

Sometimes you buy a plant that comes highly recommended as easy to care for and not picky about the soil.  You have high expectations that the plant will look as lovely in the garden as on the plant care tag.  Then you splurge on a nice, healthy plant.  You admire it as it grows, notice buds, and look forward to the day it opens.  You run outside to look at your "beautiful" plant ... and see only knawed stems.  This is my sad story of my doomed love affair with the Harvest Moon Coneflower.

One of the purple coneflowers in my yard.

This a website photo of what I was
hoping to see in my yard.

While I was watching a local gardening segment on TV a few years back, a well known local gardening expert recommended the Harvest Moon Coneflower as a low maintenance garden addition that added color without a lot of work. I began looking for the Harvest Moon Coneflower in the spring (not quite realizing yet that nurseries usually sell perennials just before they are expected to bloom). So I waited and waited, then looked and looked.  I saw other types of coneflower (like the White Swan-which, in my opinion, is one big misnomer) but not the Harvest Moon.  I began to call it my "white whale".

I finally found the Harvest Moon Coneflower at a nursery a couple of years later.  The cost of a medium sized (1 gallon) container was about $17, that seemed steep for this frugal gardener. I gave it a lot of thought, then decided I had waited so patiently for so long, had saved in so many other places, and I brought one home.

Beyond sad, this is the Harvest Moon
Coneflower in my yard this year.

A few years later I am still waiting for this poor plant to do something other than look sad.  At first I had it planted in the side yard.  It was in a protected area and it seemed to like its spot just fine.  It budded up and I was excited to see it in all its glory but it never happened.  I suspected that squirrels or birds at first ate the buds off and though disappointed, hoped for better the following year.  The following year the plant seemed healthy and grew so large it flopped and most of the blooms ended up on the ground.  So I attempted to stake it.  It looked just o.k. but not the same as the purple coneflower that stood up straight and tall even when in full bloom.  So, the next year I moved the Harvest Moon to the front yard thinking it would do better.  Less apt to be eaten, less apt to flop, and I hoped less apt to disappoint. But it's gotten worse with each passing year.

The moral of the story is that you can do everything right (right soil, right amount of sun, right amount of water, etc) and still have a plant that for some reason or another just doesn't return the love.  It's o.k. to let it go.  This a an addendum to the "No Mercy" Rule, knowing when to say good-bye.