Paul and his garden were featured in today's Anniston Star (7-13-08).
This is a copy of the article entiteled: "Kingdom of Mulch

07-13-2008
Paul Daniels appreciates the visual appeal of the coneflower. Photo: Trent Penny/The Anniston Star

PIEDMONT A backyard garden is an exercise in dirty hands, a drained wallet, happy birds and a hopeful soul.

All those benefits Paul Daniels has gained from his kingdom of mulch behind a modest brick home near Piedmont Middle School.

With a rear yard of about 100 feet by 80 feet, and a little extra space at the front and side, the site holds 130 varieties of plants.

Yet three years ago, "There was nothing here but ground" and two dogs, Daniels said.

In October 2005, Daniels and his wife, Linda, moved here from Atlanta to be company for his mother, Martha Daniels. It was a homecoming of sorts, because the older Mrs. Daniels' house, where the three now live, is where Daniels lived from the time he was 14 until he was 28.

Star Multimedia
Slideshow: Paul Daniels and his flowers
View photos of Daniels' flower garden.

(His parents had moved to Piedmont from Atlanta in 1963 so they could help her father, Isadore Wisebram, with the family business, The Fair Store, a well-known Piedmont clothing retailer.)

Paul and Linda were getting out of the Atlanta rat race when they came to Piedmont in 2005, but they were also celebrating the life that had been given back to him following treatment for cancer that had nearly killed him several years previous. Now 59, Daniels has been in remission eight years.

He became interested in gardening around the time he was receiving treatment while living in Atlanta. He was visiting a friend and noticed how animals were attracted to the garden at his friend's home.

To create an animal attraction of his own, Daniels set out bird feeders; later he put out planter boxes and pots. The apartment manager loved the transition he effected on the small patch of land behind their building, and over the course of a few years, the bond between Daniels and nature grew.

"When you're going through chemo and radiation, you're stuck," he says, noting that any company is good company. In this case, it was birds. "In your mind it's like people coming to see you every day  friends coming to see you every morning."

His favorite time of day is still early morning, before Piedmont's traffic starts rumbling on Main Street, when birds munch on the grapes and suet he sets out for them. Hummingbirds visit a patch of flowers Daniels cultivates just for them.

The transition to gardener  he still sees himself as new to the hobby  was noteworthy, since Daniels had never thought of himself as such. He concedes to having been a wild child who later gained international perspective by living in Israel from 1977 to 1983.

A garden in a small-town home? Forget it.

"Eight years ago I wouldn't walk across the street to look at a flower," but now, as his nicely designed Web

site suggests, his botanical contacts stretch across hundreds of miles. (It's web.mac.com/sinai/Site/Welcome.html.) He's also gratified by the interest that garden clubs and other hobbyists show in his relatively young plot.

Daniels was, as he puts it, "chomping at the bit" to start a full-scale garden upon the couple's return from Atlanta (they had married in 2000), so he went to work to establish some growth before that first winter.

First he used graph paper, then snaked rubber hose across the ground, to mark its boundaries. He used Roundup to kill the grass, then hired some labor to unload the 23 tons of "garden mix," a concoction of ground-up pine bark, compost and topsoil he'd bought at Miller's Sand and Landscape Supply in DeArmanville.

The garden mix went down in a layer 4 inches thick.

Daniels then set out his plants based on different arrangements he'd seen in innumerable magazines and Web sites. He created an arc of yellow, for example, using harvest moon coneflowers and yarrow. With help, he planted 300 in a single day. Then he spread mulch  pine bark, in this case  to help hold in the moisture.

So far, the worst calamity his garden has experienced is a virus-like infection that killed a great number of his coneflowers  his favorite flower.

"I love the way they look, so I replaced them the next year," he says. The cost was $5 per plant, but the disease, carried by a tiny insect, has continued to afflict them. He'll try again next season.

Another goal is to grow lots more roses.

"I'm going to cover up every wall on this house with roses," he says, gesturing to one bush on one corner.

Eighty percent of his plants are perennials because, he says, "I love the anticipation of them coming back."

That feeling dates from his earlier days of cancer treatment.

"I thought about the flowers coming back next year instead of the cancer."

How does your garden grow?

Piedmont gardener Paul Daniels offers the following ideas to anyone thinking about creating a home flower garden.

 Prepare the soil. "Don't put a ten-dollar plant in a fifty-cent hole," he said. Learn what's in your dirt, and what nutrients it might lack, by sending a sample of it to the dirt experts at Auburn  the Calhoun County Extension Office can tell you how to go about it.

 Be aware of micro-environments in your yard. Where is the sun going to be shining more consistently, and where will it be interrupted by shade? "Familiarize yourself with the movement of sun over the property," Daniels said. Tree roots will affect how well water and nutrition reaches nearby plants. Low points where water might pool for an extra six hours after a rain will support a different type of plant than would a small rise in the ground.

 Water plants when they need it, not necessarily "regularly." Water deeply so that a plant's roots can grow as far into the soil as possible, thus giving it the means to survive in extremely dry weather. How do you know if the soil is damp enough? Simple: Stick your finger in it (making sure you're in the soil itself, not just the mulch). Daniels' guideline is a gallon or two once a week per plant.

 Read voraciously. Growing a successful garden will always involve a degree of trial and error  "Where you really learn is when you get out there and do it yourself," he says  but this can be minimized by consulting sources who've already done the groundwork for you. A book Daniels recommends is Herbaceous Perennial Plants, 3rd Edition, by Allan Armitage of the University of Georgia. His copy is signed by its author.

"A green thumb is just preparation," he says."