To cram or not to cram

My new perennial bed is approaching its first birthday, and I’m taking the opportunity to assess how it’s doing. Just about all of the plants made it through the winter, probably because the project was blessed with adequate rainfall in fall and spring and good snow cover during the winter. 

Bulking up for summer

I’d like to believe that letting a thick layer of whole leaves lie on the bed through the winter also helped the young plants.

    Now I’m seeing flowers on the new perennials and low shrubs. A yellow shrub rose (‘Kolorscape Yellow Fizz’) is blooming, 

and blue-eyed grass (Sisyrinchium angustifolium ‘Lucerne’)is covered with purple flowers.

Yarrow (Achillea ‘Coronation Gold’) is covered with buds that are about to open. One of the things I love about this new bed is its relatively sunny exposure. There are few spots in the yard that get as much sun as this area right off the back deck. I was able to choose species that need direct sun for at least part of the day, and they’re getting enough sun to flower generously.

    I tried to restrain myself from planting this new bed too densely. In the past, I’ve often crammed in so many plants that they suffered from lack of space. The more aggressive growers tended to take over, shading out the timid or out-competing them for root space and access to water. That’s one way I learned what will grow in my yard and what won’t. What’s here now is what survived.

    Over-crowding is hard to resist, because there are so many plants I’d like to grow and only limited space to put them in. This time, though, I tried to think about the mature size of the plants as I placed them in the bed. As a result, they’re currently surrounded by lots of open space. They should fill in by their third summer.

More mulch than foliage this May

    Thomas Rainer and Claudia West, on the cutting edge of landscape design, advocate a different approach to plant spacing in their book Planting in a Post-Wild World. They argue for cultivated landscapes that evoke archetypal natural plant communities, such as grasslands, shrublands and forests. Instead of making the soil and site hospitable to a list of favored plants, they match plants to existing site conditions.

    There are no open mulched areas between plants under their scheme, and there's no bare soil. Their herbaceous layer, which features perennials and grasses, is surrounded by low, spreading species that fill in all the gaps, both above ground and in the root zone. By allowing each type of plant its niche, they achieve a landscape as dense as a patch of weeds. Some plant uses every inch of soil.

All niches are filled as this lawn returns to nature

    As it happens, I did choose some low-growing native species for my bed: bearberry (Arctostaphylos uva-ursi), American cranberry (Vaccinium macrocarpon), and three-leaved stonecrop (Sedum ternatum ‘Larinem Park’).  

Who knew cranberry plants were so pretty?

I’m watching to see which will grow best. Perhaps they’ll weave themselves into the kind of tapestry Rainer and West describe.

Bearberry reaching out to surround taller perennials