Plants Behaving Badly

 I keep reading articles and social media posts that tell us, “Native plant gardens may be time-consuming to create but, once they’re established, their maintenance is a fraction of the effort of conventional landscapes.”

Removing moss from the
patio off our screened porch.

To which I say, “Ha!” I could also say certain vulgar words that express the sense that people who write such things have obviously never maintained a native plant garden. I know this because I am in the midst of ‘spring maintenance’ of our ‘Homegrown National Park’ in Medfield, MA. The core of the garden is just over half an acre and is starting its eleventh year.

What goes where in our garden, designed by my wife, Betty, intelligently takes into account things like hours per day of sunlight, access to water, and proximity to specimens with similar requirements. She also created the garden to be pleasing to look at; and it is indeed a stunning sight.

But, a garden has to be maintained in order to continue to be interesting to look at. And, plants have a distressing habit of continuing to grow after being put in the ground. And, sometimes they don’t obey the description on their tags (“maxes out at three feet” or “stays within its footprint”. Even native plants can be bullies.

Planting plan of the Magnolia bed. 
Double-click for full-screen resolution.

I relate these realities because my spring maintenance project is now in its third week and I have what appears to be another three weeks of work ahead of me. The unseen asterisk to the preceding statement is that, in 2024, much maintenance was deferred for reasons too complex to explain. This year, there’s no reason to not do the job thoroughly.

There are ten distinct beds (or planting sites) on our property. For the past three days I’ve been working on the ‘Magnolia bed’. It encompasses roughly 1500 square feet of garden and it gets its name from its anchor tree, Magnolia ‘Elizabeth’. The functional parts of the bed are the foundation plantings along the east face of our house: Kalmia (mountain laurel) ‘Sara’, Leucothoe, Fothergilla (witch alder) ‘Blue Shadow’, and a massive Lonircera (honeysuckle) that rises twenty feet, hides the bulk of our garage, and is home to at least a dozen bird nests.

The Magnolia bed before its
clean-up began. Note how the 
foundation plantings have merged.

When we planted those first shrubs, we carefully read the ‘maximum spread’ descriptions for each one. The specimens of mountain laurel (two shrubs) and witch alder (three) have matured exactly as advertised and merged into an attractive clump. The lone Leucothoe – its ‘street name’ (honest to gosh) is dog’s hobble – refused to play by the rules. It has quintupled in size and is in the process of muscling aside its well-behaved companions. Thirty minutes of selective trimming brought it under control, though I am certain each year will bring fresh incursions.

The completed project.

But those miscreants were child’s play compared to the Dicentra eximia (bleeding heart) and Viola odorata (common violet). In designing the bed, Betty envisioned a meandering river of Geranium maculatum passing the length of the Magnolia bed; flowering blue and pink. In 2015, we planted twenty, one-gallon pots to establish the ‘river’ course and waited for them to grow into a stream. They did but, somehow, violets and dicentra spotted an opening and got entrenched. And, ‘entrenched’ is an understatement. The violets (they’re Asian, you know) were thoroughly entangled in the roots of the (American) geraniums. Meanwhile., the Dicentra simply decided to seed itself everywhere and to grow to ridiculous size. Elapsed time to fill six, 40-gallon trash barrels with evicted plants? Twelve hours over three days.

The Leucothoe was overwhelming
its neighboring shrubs

The northern end of the Magnolia bed brought its own set of challenges. It borders our driveway for about thirty feet and, along that path, has multiple layers of flowering perennials. Violets has, of course, become a nuisance than needed to be removed, but the more serious problems were Caltha palustris and Pycnanthemum. 

On the driveway side of the Magnolia
bed, the problem was mint

Pycnanthemum is the Linnean form of mountain mints. At least we planted it. Mountain mint has a lovely scent. But we did so in an oblong bed ten feet long and three feet wide. The key to the how and why of that spreading habit is the second word in its common name: ‘mint’. Pycnanthemum is a member of the mint family and mints sign pledges written in chlorophyl they will devote their existence to spreading far and wide for the sole purpose of annoying gardeners. For five springs I have re-established their boundary, pulling out runners ten feet from the nearest plant. And, for five springs (and apparently having a DVD of ‘The Great Escape’ at their disposal for inspiration) the mountain mint has tunneled into adjacent beds.
Caltha is better known as marsh marigold. I can state unequivocally we have never planted it on our property, yet there were several hundred seedlings thriving in a space about ten feet on a side. Getting them out required an hour of hands-and-knees search-and-pull work. Why not leave them be? Because, left to their own devices, they will grow to a height of six feet and they’re frankly ugly.

In the meantime, two of the ornamental specimens – an upright honeysuckle (Lonerica sempervirens) and beautyberry (Callicarpa americana) – decided independently that world domination begins in suburban gardens. What five years ago were two attractive flowering shrubs decided to invade one another’s turf. Both – using runners – had spread fifteen feet beyond where they were originally planted. It took three hours over two days to dig out all of the wandering runners.

This Lonerica sempervirens
(climbing honeysuckle) hides
the bulk of our garage.

Ridding the Magnolia bed of marsh marigolds, and reining in mountain mints occupied an entire afternoon.

Late yesterday afternoon, drenched in sweat, I emptied the final barrel of plant detritus into a mulch pile far from our house. Now that I have written this, I can go back outside and start on the sixth of our ten beds. Oh, joy.

 

 

Spring Renewal - the 2025 Edition

The 'before' picture

For anyone who thinks maintaining a Homegrown National Park (or any other native plant environment) is a piece of cake once the ‘hard work’ is done, here is a reality check.

By design, there is no late-autumn clean-up at our property in Medfield, Massachusetts. We let our garden sleep for the winter. The leaves that fall from trees end up under shrubs where they provide winter shelter for insects and vulnerable wildlife. The moss pathways that link parts of the garden collect branches and anything else that blows into the property.

Shown here is one small corner of our half-acre garden. We call it the ‘birch bed’ because it is anchored by Betula nigra, a dwarf black birch. At one end of the bed is a clump of three Clethra alnifolia – better known as pepperbush – ‘Hummingbird’. Under the birch is planted Packera aurea, an aggressive ground cover. Beyond the shade zone of the birch is a clump of Chelone glabra, better known as white Turtlehead, and a favored nectaring site for certain butterflies.

The Clethra, also 'before'

In April and May, we slowly bring the garden back to life. Today was cool and breezy following two days of rain. As Principal Undergardener, my job is to, well, get whatever needs to be done, done. Rather than be overwhelmed, I take one section of the garden at a time; figure out what I can do in two or three hours, gather the tools, and go to work.

What a difference a 
few hours can make...

The birch bed seemed like a good place to work this morning. The two ‘before’ photos tell the story of what needed to be done. The moss path than runs between the birch bed and the foundation planting along the east wall of our home had filled in with weeds and Packera. Tiarella and Heuchera that bordered the path had disappeared from view. The Clethra was packed with several inches of leaves. And the Packera was everywhere… despite a late-fall removal of several hundred plugs for a planting project elsewhere in town.

There is no automation for this kind of garden maintenance. You get on your hands and knees and start pulling and lifting. A rake is useless under Clethra: the shrub grows via runners that need to be encouraged. A rake is also useless in the moss pathways. Moss doesn’t have roots. Rake moss and it comes up in pieces or sheets. This is skilled work only in that you use common sense to know what you should and shouldn’t do.

The Clethra, free of leaves
and Packera aurea

And, one of the things you shouldn’t do is hurry.  Speed results in pulling up a ‘good plant’ or severing a Clethra’s runner. Gardening breeds patience.

It took just under three hours to accomplish what you see in the ‘after’ photos. There are three bags of leaves, weeds, and excess Packera in the deep woods behind our home. Over the course of several years, that plant debris will compost into rick soil. What a great natural cycle.

And what good exercise…