Cherish Those Perennials
Reduce Garden Maintenance: Let Your Perennials Grow Wild
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How nice it would be to have a nice colorful garden, but yet still have reduced maintenance. It can be done with your plants and still hold the line on upkeep. Depending on where you live, you can take a short trip and bring some flowers from woods and meadows to your garden. You can also let some of your garden flowers run wild.
Many perennials that grow in dignity in a well-ordered, well-weeded border could contribute the same color, fragrance, and beauty to another area if you let them. Suppose you let them run loose in your own tiny or large meadow or woodsy area, should you have either.
Wherever you set them to naturalize, bee balm, spiderwort and dianthus become as independent as the native flower, needing no watering, weeding or feeding. This is an ideal way to simplify gardening with no sacrifice of beauty, whether in the ground or indoors in cut flower arrangements. To be sure, most, if not all of our garden flowers were once wild. The normal state in which we are accustomed to seeing them is not their natural state.
I was first inspired to experiment with this idea one day towards the end of summer when I found iris and corn trying to occupy exactly the same spot in our vegetable garden. I uprooted the iris, but it looked so good I simply could not throw it away. The next door neighbor took some, but there were still plenty of clumps left. I took them down the South Meadow to a spot where it is sunny all day and slightly boggy.
With no heart for digging in the tough grass, but just to experiment, I merely dumped the plants. I did, however, take the time to set them right side up. Picking up some loose hay that lay nearby (the meadow had had its annual cut a few weeks before) I tossed it over the rhizomes and promptly forgot them. Yes, you guessed it. The next year, up came the iris, all blooming like mad. They’re still going strong.
Now, I don’t recommend such treatment, however many perennials can be handled in ways not much more complicated than that. Thus you can transfer them to uncultivated areas of your outdoors. You could have a great number of flowering plants with little effort but rich rewards.
My sister’s favorite flower is Lily-of-the-Valley. I always wanted some too, but hesitated because of the need for clearing an area, digging a bed, keeping it tended, etc. There is no place for such a bed in our wild meadows. But one day when walking in the neighboring woods we came upon remnants of a long-since vanished house-only a stone section from the cellar wall remained standing.
The whole area in and around this was one mass of Lily-of-the-Valley. They are so solid and dense that no weed could force its way up. If Lily-of-the-Valley would do that here, why not for us? With permission, I dug up some of the plants and replanted them under the trees along our old stone wall. There they thrive with no care, producing masses of flowers every season. The first year or so I kept the weeds out. In December if I feel benevolent I give the plants a little manure (They grow next to the manure pile.)
Bee balm offered another pleasant experience in carefree gardening. Down in a semi-shaded area along the stream where the ground is not boggy but never gets really bone dry either, there was a tangle of Jewel Weed and other miscellaneous grasses. I planted a red-flowered variety of bee balm in the midst of the tangle. All I did first was to sickle the area.
This time I did not set the plants on top of the earth but in it, though I did not worry about surrounding weeds. In three years they have grown and multiplied amazingly. We have the pleasure of watching humming birds come to this plant for their summer dinners. From our terrace we often look down and see several ruby throats hovering among the scarlet blossoms.
In our meadow I set out a half-dozen plants of sun-loving Coreopsis. I had seen them running riot over New England meadows, so I had no qualms. These have exceeded all expectations. They have spread out over three times their original area. All during summer, when we feel like it, we can cut a beautiful bouquet for the house. Take advantage of any wild flowers in or close to your area and you too can have a beautiful low maintenance garden.