Actually, pictured are SIX more reasons, and they're just a few of the groundcovers that look just fine here in late November (photos taken 11/22). My point is that all of them are all much nicer to look at than dead leaves. Isn't winter dreary enough without covering up our evergreen groundcovers?
Now if you garden in, say, Buffalo like my friend Elizabeth, your beds are going to be covered with snow all winter anyway, so what the hell. But here in balmy Zone 7, we get to see plants..
Clockwise from upper left are: Hellebore, lambs' ears, Vinca minor, Pulmonaria, Carex 'Ice Dance', and Ajuga.
I snapped this shot of the old English ivy that had covered my butt-ugly fence for decades to illustrate a really important fact: this stuff is waaay too thick, vigorous and heavy to be enveloping the canopies of trees. But just in case a picture isn’t worth a bunch of words, here’s the rap sheet on English ivy in trees:
It provides the ideal home for all sorts of harmful insects, including gypsy moths.
Its sheer weight can easily kill smaller trees, like dogwoods.
When allowed to grow more than 10 feet or so vertically, it matures, changes form, and makes berries, which are then distributed by birds all over the place. Not nice.
Killing the Damn Stuff
But no matter how much ivy may be growing up into your trees, it’s a breeze to kill and remove it. Simply slice a section from each ivy trunk at any point you can reach it, and then let it die a slow death. Eventually the dead leaves will fall and the birds will use the old vines as nesting material and you’ll feel like a hero.
Now how to kill ivy at the base is a trickier proposition, which leads me to the question: Can ivy stumps be killed without using a synthetic herbicide? Not quickly, but it can be done slowly by drilling holes in the ivy stumps and then covering them with fresh compost. Another method that’s recommended for organic gardeners is covering the stump with plastic and again, simply waiting.
I know, I’m always ranting about plants being called "no-care" that most certainly are NOT, but really I do absolutely nothing for this plant except pick up the wilted stems after the first frost. That’s it.
Then the next year in early summer they reappear and in greater number because they’re happy seeders. Hardy begonias are fine with any amount of sun or none at all, though I imagine if they’re sitting in the blaring afternoon sun they DO need watering. These get just moments of direct sunlight. Happy Garden Blogger Bloom Day.
You’d think I’d have been warned off by the horror stories reported by Daves Garden contributors about Trumpet Vine (Campsis radicans). Like?
Spreads up to 40-50 ft from host plant
Strangles plants, trees
Invades gardens, robbing them of nutrients
Crawls up houses and gets under siding. Rips gutters from house
I never would have thought it could punch a hole up and through asphalt
And on and on. And I’d read all that and wrote that I couldn’t recommend this native vine because of so many horror stories, but shoot, I said to myself, I can handle it. Experienced gardener and all that.
Well, as if that weren’t stupid enough, even before the plant starts destroying my home and garden I can see by its foliage that it’s none other than the weed I’ve been battling on my property for 24 years now, with no success. Why didn’t I recognize it in my research? Oh, maybe because the photos I’d seen of it were of its lovely flowers, rather than the crappy, rampant foliage. Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.
But now what? Oh, I’m moving the chimnea again, too. Oy vey.
Continuing the gardenblogger tradition of showing off our blooms on the 15th of the month, I present one of my favorite scenes in the garden: lacecap hydrangeas, astilbes and (in the upper right) an ‘Anthony Waterer’ spirea. For a longer view, click on over to GardenRant.
They certainly require the most maintenance of all the plants I’ve ever grown, trying as I do to avoid high-maintenance plants altogether.
Hardy Kiwi
But let me make my case. On the left in this photo the bright green foliage is just a hint of the vigor to come from three hardy kiwis that I struggle to keep from eating my house. Over the course of the summer I’ll fill 8 to 10 full-size trash cans with the trimmings, and that’s a lot of trimming. No wonder the standard advice is to prune it back HARD in early spring – which I don’t do because I’d have to retrain it to where I want it every year. After eight years it began producing flowers, but so far, no fruits have appeared. Yes, I supposedly have at least one male and one female – if tags are to be believed – so I still have hope after 12 years growing the stuff. It’s the most commented-on plant in my garden, hands down.
English ivy
And what’s that ugly brown stuff on the trellis but good old (ugh) English ivy, the ground cover/climber that blankets the land in large parts of my county, including the wooded valley my garden is part of. Seeking to cover the crappy metal wall of my tool shed, the walls with the ever-peeling paint no matter how what type is used, I added a trellis and trained some of my existing ivy up it. You know how mistakes can look fine the first season and bite your ass the second? That’s the story of this mistake, and now the vines have covered the window and are quickly covering the roof, too, and there’s no way to trim it coz it’s out of reach.
So last fall I removed what I could reach and just let the unreachable parts die over the winter – but LOOK at it! Now I’ll be seeing those dead leaves all season, at least. When I did the same cut-and-let-die trick on the ivy covering my trees it took at least a year for the stuff to fall off. Though finally there was a pay-off when birds made good use of the dead stems for their nests. So, a happy ending, I guess.
Crossvine/bignonia
Now look above the tool shed over to my neighbors’ trellis and you see a vine I’ve been coveting for its huge orange tubular flowers, its green leaves all winter, and the fact that it’s native. (It’s always nice to find another native that does well in the garden to add to the great sustainable nonnatives I’ve collected over the decades.) I’ve already bought one, in fact, and it’s now at the base of the trellis, getting settled in its new home. But I’m leery of even this seemingly perfect vine. Will it, too, become a headache, a chore, an unruly mess? You know, like the trumpet vine I just bought – also a native – is predicted to become?
But enough of my plant rant. What’s YOUR most demanding plant or plant group?
It’s a glorious mid-spring day here in Maryland, perfect for the Open Garden and Plant Giveway I’m throwing for my coaching clients. This is the first of its kind, though, I’m not sure why because my garden yields lots of passalongs every year and who better to give them to? Also this year I’ve started sending clients seasonal to-do lists with links to full instructions. Rather than write up names and instructions, I’m sending everyone to this page to find out what they have and how to keep it alive.
Celandine poppies are native to this area. They only bloom once – now – but the foliage looks fabulous all season. They’re shade-lovers that’ll seed vigorously for you.
Solomon’s seal do bloom but are primarily grown for their green and white foliage – though they’ll disappear completely after the first hard frost. Their tuber-like roots spread and make this plant quite drought-tolerant, but those tall stalks may flop after you’ve planted them. If so, you could cut back the stems by half or even stake the stems til the roots are settled enough to hold them up.
Astilbes like shade or part-shade (preferably not hot afternoon sun).
Euphorbia amygdaloides var. robbiae (Robb’s Spurge) is what I have the most of. I’ve trimmed off the chartreuse flowers on the giveaways because otherwise, they’d flop (not liking being moved in flower). These evergreen beauties can’t tolerate any hot sun directly on them. They spread by those long tendril-type roots.
The assorted hostas have to go because I now have deer. Except for a couple of short green and white ones, they’re all large cultivars, blue or chartreuse.
Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ are 15" tall, love sun and attract swarms of pollinators. Their cauliflower-like flowers start creamy in late summer, then turn pink, red and rust in succession. You can leave the dried flowers up all winter for "winter interest," but cut off the dead ones in early spring.
How to keep them alive
Get them in the ground as soon as possible, with good soil-root contact (pat them down) and give ‘em a good soaking. Then keep the soil around them wet for a week – longer if they’re in the hot sun (and you might even construct some temporary shade for them.) Then keep an eye on them for the first month in their new home. Especially when the temperatures are near or approaching 90, like now, transplants are in danger of not surviving the move. Water, water, water.
For as long as anyone can remember, the wooded valley that my back yard is part of has been covered with English ivy. Not just on the forest floor but even up into the trees where it matures and produces berries, berries that are then spread far and wide by the birds. But then came another vine that – can it be? – managed to win the battle of primacy with the ivy – the five-leaf akebia. It now has a lock on the lowest, wettest parts of the valley.
Then suddenly the fastest spreading invasive plant EVER landed in our valley - the lovely garlic mustard. Its beauty (of sorts) is important to mention because when I’ve shown it to neighbors I’ve discovered that it’s been picked, brought indoors and admired! Oh well. Even if they removed it by its roots it wouldn’t slow the steady march of garlic mustard across the woodland floor.
It’s really no wonder this plant is so successful. It likes the sun, it likes the shade, it seems to like every damn location in North America.
So thank to Barbara Lucas and her pals in the Midwest for this video that goes a long way to showing exactly what mustard garlic looks like and then how to get rid of it. I think I’ll forward this to my neighborhood Yahoo group with the broad hint that we make ridding our valley of this one plant our New Year’s Resolution for the lovely woodland we share.
Thanks to Janet Draper, horticulturist at the Smithsonian’s Ripley Garden on the National Mall, I’m CRAVING these flowering annuals, all super-easy to grow from seed outdoors. Yes, I was much relieved to hear Janet dismiss the notion of growing seed indoors as waaay too much trouble. I hear ya! But these beauties can be just tossed about for that wild, cottage-garden look – once, and you never have to buy them again. Then to "design" them, just edit out the ones you don’t want. Oh, and the tossing about can start now, in late winter as the snows melt.
Upper left are Sweet Asyllum (Lobularia maritima) in rose pink.
Upper right the very cool seeds pods of Opium Poppy (Papaver somniferum). Gotta have it.
Lower right – nice mix of Forget-Me-Nots (Myosostis)
Lower left, gorgeous mix of larkspur, lillies, achillea, and echinops.
I snapped this shot of the old English ivy that had covered my butt-ugly fence for decades to illustrate a really important fact: this stuff is waaay too thick, vigorous and heavy to be enveloping the canopies of trees. But just in case a picture isn’t worth a bunch of words, here’s the rap sheet on English ivy in trees: 
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