By Michael Tortorello
New York Times
A berry bush may be nature’s answer to the gumball machine. There the thing stands, dispensing bits of cheer by the palmful.
For a few years now, a pair of Saskatoon berries (Amelanchier alnifolia) have dangled clusters of deep purple fruit in front of my duplex in Minneapolis. It seemed a shame to leave them behind when my girlfriend and I moved to grander quarters.
Moving a garden, it turns out, raises quandaries that are horticultural, emotional and even legal. Case law is ”undeveloped,” said Stewart Sterk, 58, a professor at the Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law at Yeshiva University in New York. Gardeners may be grabby and they may be querulous. But given the costs of litigation, he said, ”no one actually sues about this stuff.”
That doesn’t mean that a seller is free to raid a perennial bed like an open bar in the reception hall next to a dry wedding. Like, say, a furnace, a tree or plan is ”a fixture that’s there, and the ordinary expectation is, it’s going to stay there.”
The best course, Sterk said, might be to spell out provisions for a beloved plant in the sale contract. But, he acknowledged, ”You feel funny telling people, ‘I’m going to take that.’ ”
The real estate agent is often left to do the shoveling on these disputes. Kathleen Evangelista, 45, a real estate agent in western Nassau County, N.Y., once had to negotiate an allowance for fig trees. The seller, an Italian immigrant, had grown two 6-foot trees from seeds that he had collected in the old country.
In the Italian-American community, winter brings ”a whole fig-tree ritual,” Evangelista said. ”You have to cover it with a bucket and wrap it in plastic for the season.” Once it’s in this dormant state, the fig tree must not be disturbed.
”We were going to be closing sometime in January,” Evangelista said. ”So we had to write into the contract — lawyers had to talk about it — that the seller had the right to come back to the property and dig up the fig trees in the fall.”
When Joan Sheridan and her husband put their New Rochelle, N.Y., split-level on the market in 2005, potential buyers were actually scared of their expansive garden. ”It was lovely to look at,” she said of the half-acre spread. ”But they didn’t think they could keep it up. I think we lost a lot of buyers.”
After Sheridan, 65, took early retirement in 1992, she had studied to become a master gardener. That was the point at which the front lawn had disappeared beneath an onslaught of perennials. When the couple resettled in a home in North Salem, N.Y., she enlisted a five-car caravan to help move some of her choice specimens.
The first sortie carried 80 plants. When the home didn’t sell that fall, Sheridan reassembled the caravan and led another hauling operation.
Ultimately, ”my husband claims I moved about 400 plants,” Sheridan said. Yet even ”with all the plants I moved,” she said, ”everyone said you could not tell that one plant was missing.”
Back at Rancho Tortorello, I wondered what would make a good candidate for transplantation. Dawn Pettinelli, 55, the manager of the Home and Garden Education Center at the University of Connecticut, proposed a simple determinant for what stays and what goes.
”Anything that you can physically pick up,” Pettinelli said, you can move.
Some plants put down roots more than 12 inches deep. This reluctant group would include delphiniums, hollyhocks and perennial hibiscus.
Other perennials with shallow, fibrous root systems will happily join you at a new home. These will be the plants that divide easily, too: sedums, asters, phloxes, Shasta daisies, mums and coral bells.
As biological procedures go, moving a garden isn’t like transplanting a kidney. You can get the job done with a shovel and a bucket or plastic bag for the root ball. An overcast morning or evening will help keep the roots shaded, cool and moist.
Early spring and fall offer the highest odds for survival. The plant will appreciate a full growing season to set up shop, Pettinelli said, ”but if you’re a desperate horticulturist, you could do it any time of the year.”
The best plan would be to plunk the plants into the new yard immediately. But ”you know you’re not going to do that,” she added. For this reason, she recommends potting perennials in a soilless mix.
What if you’ve already moved and regret what you left behind? Pettinelli said to consider digging up suckers, taking cuttings or foraging for pods, berries, fruits and seeds.
So on a cool Friday morning, I cleared the Big Wheel out of the minivan and went a-raiding in my soon-to-be-former yard. First, I rounded up the Saskatoons. Back at our new home, I planted them next to the sidewalk, in reach of my kids.
Next, I dug up a couple of grapevines. The switch grass wasn’t going anywhere. I could no more get a spade through the thick thatch of rhizomes than I could comb through a dreadlock.
Before I left, I took lopping shears to tame the thicket of raspberries in the backyard. Over the years, the plants had been a filler of pies and a provider of flesh wounds. But after today, they were another thing: someone else’s problem.