GARDEN SPLENDOR REWARDS PATIENCE.

Byline: Joshua Siskin

``I need it now'' may have become the credo of our times, yet things still happen slowly in the garden, no matter how much of a hurry you're in. The garden remains a bastion of slow motion, a place to learn the meaning and the value of patience.

Little plants you stuck in the ground one year ago and wondered if they would ever grow are suddenly flourishing. After a winter of looking at nothing but stems and leaves and wondering if flowers would ever again grace the garden, here come waves of yellow, red, pink and violet blooms.

Even more instructive in the art of patience are those perennials that have been in your back yard for several years or more and never done much. Suddenly, this spring, perhaps because of the late rains, those perennials - the African hibiscus, the Jerusalem sage, the Tapien verbena and the sweet pea shrub - are all flowering with uninhibited glee.

In a world of ever-increasing mobility and speed, plants fascinate us because of their placid productivity, their self-sufficiency despite being fixed to the ground.

Instant gratification means nothing to a gardener. The greatest pleasures come from patient observation of a plant's progress. You plant a seed and see it grow into a sapling, and then watch that sapling turn into a tree, and then continue to follow the progress of that tree for the next 20 or 30 or 50 years.

Still, there are regular time-saving advances in horticultural technology that cannot be ignored. One of these advances was the sod farm. For years people had been cutting out pieces of lawn and moving them from one part of the yard to another until someone had the idea of duplicating this process on a large scale. Soon vast acreages were devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass, also known as turf. Now a fresh carpet of sod, acquired in 1-by-5-foot strips, could instantly transform a mangy terrain of dirt and weeds into an expanse of emerald green.

But those strips of sod were heavy because they came with a thick layer of soil attached. Also, since roots had to be cut when transplanting the sod from farm to front yard, newly sodded lawns could easily go into shock.

Soilless sod is a relatively new invention that has made the job of installing a lawn easier. Pieces are larger yet weigh half as much as regular sod. The edges of each strip are straight, so, unlike with conventional sod, there is no problem lining strips up cheek by jowl during installation. As logical extensions of soilless sod technology, soilless ground cover and wildflower ``sods'' have recently made their appearance. Korean grass (Zoysia tenuifolia), that undulating light green grass that literally makes waves in the garden, is available in soilless pieces.

So is ``No Mow,'' a fine fescue blend for planting on shady slopes in hot Valley locations. ``No Mow'' grows up to a foot tall and creates a meadow grass look, despite its moderate water requirement. There is also a wildflower mix, consisting of daisies, poppies, violets and other flowers, that can be used to provide a flowering carpet for the garden. This wildflower mix, it seems to me, would be appropriate as a replacement for that useless, water-guzzling strip of parkway grass that grows, throughout the Valley, between sidewalk and street.

All of the above soilless products have been developed by Pacific Earth Resources of Camarillo. You can find out more about them by accessing the Web site at www.PacificEarth.com., or calling [phone] for more information.

TIP OF THE WEEK: Some gardeners go all out when preparing soil for vegetables or annual flowers but skimp when planting perennials. This is a big mistake. Perennials will respond to aerated and well-amended soil with more flowers and longer bloom periods than if they are just inserted into unprepared soil.