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Proper planning ensures reliable spring bulbs

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Each year I plan, purchase and plant thousands of bulbs. Here’s what I’ve learned to do in fall to insure the best show of spring bulbs.

In early April, all eyes will be on this blooming cornelian cherry tree (Cornus mas), or gazing at the yard art. Plan the bulb planting scheme in the fall to highlight those attractions.

Think “grocery produce section” when selecting bulbs

When you choose bulbs in person at the local garden center, you have a significant advantage: you have direct control over quality. Make the most of it. Pretend you’re at a grocery store choosing vegetables, because that’s what bulbs are—root crops.

You would think twice about buying a mushy potato, rubbery carrot or shriveled onion. Be just as choosy with bulbs. Select for firmness and even color. Check for soft spots that may be on their way to rotting, and reject bare-root ephemerals like foxtail lily (Eremurus) if they have broken roots. Take the largest of any bunch.

Keep the same mindset if you must store bulbs before planting. If the bulb has a tunic (a papery skin as on a tulip, daffodil, crocus, etc.) or a horny surface (such as snowdrops and spring-blooming anemone), store it cool and dry like you would store onions or garlic. If it does not have a protective covering, like a true lily or a bare foxtail lily root, keep it as you would carrots—cool and humid in a refrigerator crisper drawer or root cellar. If it’s wrapped, make sure that condensation doesn’t collect and puddle inside to incite rot on the surface of the bulb or root.

About price: Bargain basement bulbs are usually disappointing. If you buy the cheapest, you’re almost certain to receive bulbs half the size of premium items. They may be dry and wasted from improper storage. Given years of ideal conditions, such bulbs may produce a decent display. Next spring, however, they’ll present flowers few and small.

Beware of low-priced collections too. Whether of mixed varieties of one species or a “spring collection” of different species, they rarely live up to their promise. The catalog may illustrate a mix of six types of daffodil or tulip yet ship just 5 of the fancier types to each 45 of a pale, small-flowered type. The mixed-species collections often contain only a few of each big, showy species (hyacinths, daffodils, tulips) but many of each minor bulb (squill, winter aconite, glory-of-the-snow, etc.). They sometimes include downright weedy species such as star of Bethlehem (Ornithogalum umbellatum).

Far too often, the tiny, early bulbs are overlooked when we plan and plant in fall. Yet masses of any of this collection can be planted to naturalize most anywhere in a landscape. Flowers, from left: White Puschkinia with its baby blue stripe accompanies early daffodil ‘Jack Snipe,’ fading away as lamium covers that ground. Blue squill (Scilla sibirica) plus the blue and white forms of woodland anemone (Anemone blanda) are great partners with the evergreen perennial lenten rose (Helleborus x orientalis) under a kousa dogwood. Blue ‘Harmony’ and standard purple iris (Iris reticulata) can mix it up with yellow crocus (Crocus chrysanthus) among clumps of blue fescue or perennial fountain grass.

Include early-, mid- and late-blooming types

You can enjoy spring bulb bloom from early March until early June. Most crocuses come early in that line-up, followed by Dutch hyacinth and daffodils in April, and tulips from late April into May. Alliums, foxtail lily and others carry the show into June. Within each group, however, there are early-, mid-, and late-blooming species and varieties. Take the time in fall to plan a mix that will give you spring color every week that’s important to you. (See the sidebar “Parade of bloomin’ bulbs” for a starting line-up.)

Short on space? You can plant two, three or even four kinds of bulbs in one area if you choose for separate seasons and give all players elbow room. For instance, I have planted squill, early species tulip (Tulipa kaufmanniana), checker lily (Fritillaria meleagris), and drumstick allium (Allium sphaerocephalon) in one spot. I excavated that bulb area about 10 inches deep and placed the tulips, then added a few inches of soil and set the checker lilies and drumstick alliums. Finally I added another inch of soil, scattered the squill and covered it all with the rest of the soil.

There’s no right or wrong in bulbs or any other aspect of gardening, just different ways for each gardener and garden. A catalog may recommend 188 Grecian windflowers (Anemone blanda) per square yard, and you certainly can plant that many for immediate impact. Yet you can also place just a few near your favorite garden sculpture and watch them multiply over the years.

Plant them where you’ll see them

Before you plant, stand in the windows you use most in late winter and early spring. Look at your garden from there and from the driveway where you enter and exit. Plant spring bulbs where you will be able to see them from these vantage points or you’re wasting your time and money.

Bulb color goes a long way—if you can see it. So it’s a smart move to plant daffodils where you will see them each day as you leave and come home again. Never forget as you make your choices, however, that most spring bulbs need full sun to bloom well. Note the difference here in the amount of bloom between the daffodils in the wooden barrels and those in the beds. Those in the barrels were sun-grown in pots and moved into the planters for temporary show. Those in the beds have grown there for years, shaded most of each day.

Plant them deep

The rule of thumb for bulb depth is to set a bulb with soil over its nose 2 to 3 times as deep as the bulb is tall. That means to plant a tulip, daffodil, lily or large allium, you need a hole 8 or 9 inches deep. That will accept the three-inch bulb plus at least six inches of soil above it. Most people plant shallow and pay for it in frost damage, toppling flowers and blooms that come one year then never again.

I plant even deeper than recommended. I put large bulbs in holes at least 11 inches deep. If the drainage is good, they don’t mind at all, and need dividing less often. Plus, I won’t harm them as I garden because they’re all below the reach of my nine-inch spade blade.

Doubtful? Experiment with just a few bulbs planted deeper this fall. Note what you planted deep, where, so you can gauge the results next spring. I still do, since I’m not sure I’ve pushed it to the limit, in terms of depth. One fall, after planting a dozen tulips a foot deep, I forgot all about them and later dumped a wheelbarrow of soil there and topped that with a leftover bale of straw. The next spring, the tulips grew from a foot down, through the piled soil, plus 14 inches of baled straw to bloom cheerily above the heap.

That just goes to show that there’s no absolute right or wrong when it comes to using bulbs or any other aspect of gardening. Take that to heart as you plan and plant bulbs this fall. Have fun, and enjoy the surprises spring will bring.

Parade of bloomin’ bulbs

Here’s a list of which bulbs are likely to bloom when, with what. To use it, remember it’s only a guide—winter and spring weather can slow one bulb and speed another—and adjust for length of growing season. It’s geared to use in northern zone 5, where the growing season starts later than it does in a more southern zone 5 but earlier than on the Lake Superior shore zone 5. So change mid-March to early March if you’re in zone 6, or to late February for a zone 7 North Carolina winter home.

Very early (by mid-March): Snowdrops (Galanthus), early crocus (Crocus sieberi, C. minimus, C. tommasinianus), danford and netted iris (Iris danfordiae, I. reticulata).

Early (late March to mid-April): Grecian windflower and wood anemone (Anemone blanda, A. nemerosa), squill (Scilla sibirica), Puschkinia libanotica, Dutch crocus, Dutch hyacinth, early- and mid-season daffodils, firespray- and tarda tulips (Tulipa praestans, T. dasystemon), glory-of-the-snow (Chionodoxa).

Mid-season (late April and early May): Late daffodils, early tulips (Triumph, Foster, multi-flora, and Greigii tulips followed by lily-flowered and fringed types), western trout lily (Erythronium ‘Pagoda’), checker lily (Fritillaria meleagris), summer snowflake (Leucojum‘ Gravetye’), grape hyacinth (Muscari).

Late (mid- to late May): Late and parrot tulips, species tulip (Tulipa wilsoniana), quamash (Camassia), large-flowered alliums, sego lily (Calochortus), perennial glads (Gladiolus byzantinus), bluebells (Hyacinthoides campanulata).

Very late (end of May and into June): Sicilian honey lily (Nectaroscordum siculum), foxtail lily (Eremerus), drumstick and blue allium (Allium sphaerocephalon, A. caeruleum), California hyacinth (Triteleia laxa, Brodiaea).

Article by Janet Macunovich and photos by Steven Nikkila, www.gardenatoz.com.

RELATED: Moving spring flowering bulbs

RELATED: Plant Focus – Crocus

Create your own allergy-free garden

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Select the right plants to reduce allergies in the garden

Do you enjoy seeing plants like this beautybush (Kolkwitzia amabilis), watching the butterflies and hummingbirds that sip its nectar, or smelling its sweet fragrance? Or do you or someone you know have allergies that force you to keep distance and windows between you and the garden? Here’s some help, in the form of hypo-allergenic plants, materials and techniques.

Does garden work make you sick? Literally? Or is there someone else in your life who can’t breathe freely in the presence of plants and other garden materials? If so, give yourself or that other a break. Change your plant choices, planting arrangements and work habits now to reduce your garden’s allergy irritation quotient.

A sizable portion of the U.S. population suffers from allergies. Many of the afflicted are children, but adults are learning, to their surprise, that these conditions can develop even late in life. To some of these sufferers, their allergies are only low-level nuisances. Others face more serious symptoms. Every one pays some cost and makes compromises to get by.

Spot allergy offenders before they’re under your nose

The word pollen comes from the Latin for “dust.” When it’s airborne, pollen can be a potent allergen. However, not all plants produce pollen and not all pollen floats in air. People with hay fever are wise to look for pollen-free flowers and heavy-pollen plants.

Pollen-free flowers are not common. Pollen is essential for seed formation, so in the natural course of things, every plant species produces these yellow, orange, or other-colored grains on stamens—the “male” portion of a flower. The important thing here is that in some species such as holly, mulberry, kiwi and ginkgo, some individuals in the group make flowers without stamens. These “females” are the seed-bearers of their species, and they are ladies a person with allergies can appreciate. (See sidebar with female and male plant lists: “Battle of the sexes.”)

Wind-pollinated means trouble

The worst kind of pollen is from wind-pollinated plants—”anemophilous” species. Such grains float so they’re easily inhaled, plus the species that produce them tend to go overboard when it comes to amount. Less troublesome is sticky and heavy pollen, produced by plants that rely on insects and birds to carry it around. These heavy pollen “entomophilous” plants also make less pollen than wind-pollinated species. They don’t need clouds of the stuff when they can rely on hungry pollinators to race directly from one flower to the next.

There are several ways to distinguish between wind-pollinated and heavy pollen plants. One is to check lists such as the sidebar in this article: “Most common culprits in pollen allergies.” Another is the shake test. A third involves learning to recognize what bugs and birds find attractive.

The shake test is simple. Shake plants to see where pollen clouds form. Ask someone who does not have pollen allergies to walk your yard every week or two from early April through late June—the months when pollen counts from trees and shrubs are highest—and rattle your plants. Where this raises puffs or clouds of “dust,” you should doubt that plant. Is it one you are allergic to, or a close relative? Is it one many people are allergic to? You might want to replace such a plant with something more innocuous.

Trees, grasses and weeds most to blame for allergies

When doing shake tests, don’t focus on plants with obvious bloom. The plants most often responsible for pollen allergies—certain trees, grasses and wind-pollinated weed species—have flowers so inconspicuous or so different from typical florist flowers that we may think they have no bloom at all. Where birches or pines overhang a patio and coat it with pollen, people who live there often fail to connect plant to powder. Gardeners who bump branches while clipping juniper bushes in spring are often shocked by the puffs of yellow pollen this stirs.

Not all airborne pollen is problematic, and some is much worse than others. Knowing which to look into is a big first step.

The third way to recognize airborne and heavy pollen involves looking at pollinators, flower sizes and form. If you see that many bees or other flying insects visit a particular kind of flower, chances are good that the only way that plant’s pollen moves is on the legs and body of a carrier. Even before you see insects, if you keep in mind that they follow visual clues in looking for food you’ll start to recognize the plants they service—those with big blooms or many small blooms in showy, large clusters.

Some people are allergic to bee stings, and might want to focus on bird- and butterfly-pollinated plants. These generally have flowers shaped like or equipped with deep, narrow funnels where nectar collects as the blooms ripen.

Spotting and reducing non-plant allergens

Although fewer people are allergic to molds and fungal spores than to pollen, these can trigger allergic reactions too. They rise up by the millions every time you rake leaves, turn the compost or disturb a mulch layer.

So hire a helper to rake leaves, or wear a mask when you do that chore. Work on a cool, still day after a rain, when the air is less likely to carry allergens. Let your city or township compost your leaf litter and other yard waste—don’t pile it and mix it in your own yard.

Eliminate or reduce your use of organic mulch such as bark. Switch to gravel mulch, which allows spores, mold particles, and dust to fall down into the spaces between stones. That’s better than having it rest at the surface where it can take off in the breeze that also caresses your window.

Organic matter tends to build up in stone mulch over time, so its ability to absorb troublesome particles decreases over time. Sprinklers splashing on its surface can raise the settled particles, too, so consider trickle irrigation or weeper hoses.

Also, weed seeds settle into that organic build-up, and can be difficult to eradicate without the use of herbicides that you probably should avoid. So plan to replace stone regularly.

If periodic removal and replacement of gravel is beyond your budget, try a triple thickness of newspaper as mulch, held in place with a thin layer of Turface or another of the gravel-like soil conditioners. When such products become gummed up with organics, they can be covered with a new layer of paper and clean Turface. The original layer will mix gradually, harmlessly into the soil.

Replace troublemakers with low-allergen plants and materials

When you remove troublemaking pollen producers, replace them with species that produce less pollen and are pollinated by insects or birds. Double-flowered varieties are often good choices, since what’s been lost in developing those extra petals on a double rose of Sharon (Hibiscus syriacus) or snowball viburnum (V. opulus ‘Roseum’) are the pollen-producing stamens.

Be sure to learn the mature size of each new plant you consider, and place your additions where they can grow without pruning. Pruning is a branch-rustling, mold-raising chore that allergy sufferers should bypass.

Design more dramatically, and build in filters

Two more things to aim for as you place new plants are high contrast and massed effect, so that you can enjoy your landscape even from afar or through glass. Try clumps of red foliage plants near yellow, big-leaf plants in front of lacy leaf or needled species, distinctly shorter items at the feet of taller individuals, and combinations of varieties with distinctive, no-prune shapes.

Focusing on the distance may help you free up the foreground too. Take vines and shrubs away from your windows where they have a greater potential to contaminate your air.

Whenever you can, place windbreaks between yourself and problem plants upwind in your neighborhood that you can’t eliminate. This calls for using binoculars or imposing a little on neighbors as you do more shake tests to identify the plants that may be causing you trouble. The potential pay-off makes it worthwhile. You don’t have to account for the whole neighborhood—tree pollen can carry a long way but most falls within about 50 feet of the source.

Hedges and fences can serve as windbreaks, slowing wind speed on their lee side for at least ten times their own height. Place a windbreak so that it is at least five feet upwind of any place where you plan to sit or work, because the space just downwind of a hedge receives fall-out as the wind slows and is forced to drop its load of particulate matter and pollen.

A mixed hedge of flowering shrubs such as weigela can replace pollen-heavy yews or junipers if winter privacy is not an issue. Place each shrub so it has room to grow to its full size, to eliminate pruning and all its mold-raising potential.

Reduce your work to reduce your exposure

Do all you can to reduce your yard work. Throw a garden party twice a year and invite sympathetic friends to help. Have all the materials lined up and ready, and bring your hired help in that same day.

Mowing spells allergy trouble, so hire that chore out, and replace lawn where you can with no-mow groundcovers. Have the lawn aerated and treated annually with slow-release fertilizer in the cool, still days of late fall so that turf will be fuller and healthier, less likely to harbor weeds such as ragweed.

Choose plants that are well suited for your site, and not susceptible to pests so that they will be healthy without application of fertilizers, herbicides and pesticides. All of these products are potential trouble for people who have already developed sensitivity to pollen, mold or dust.

Work smart when you spend time in the garden

Finally, decrease your risk by working on cool, windless days, and after every air-cleansing rain. Avoid warm, dry, windy days when pollen counts are highest.

While you’re out, cover your arms, legs and neck. Wear a mask if you mow or rake. When you finish working, undress in the garage and leave work clothes and shoes outdoors—one gram of soil may contain thousands of pollen grains. Shower after working, so you won’t transfer pollen grains, mold or spores into your clean clothes or bed. We can love our plants without sleeping with them!

Most common culprits in pollen allergies

Of 250,000 flowering plant species, only about 100 species have pollen that causes us trouble. Pollen allergy, also called hay fever, rose fever or allergic rhinitis, is most often caused by tree, grass and certain weed pollen. Here are some chief irritants, with the worst in bold.

Trees: alder, ash, aspen, birch, box elder, cottonwood (the pollen, not the fluff from female trees!), elm, hickory, juniper, linden, locust, maple, oak, poplar, sycamore, tamarisk, willow.
Grasses: Bermuda grass, bluegrass (Kentucky bluegrass), Johnson, orchard, redtop, sweet vernal, and Timothy grass.
Weeds: artemisias (including sweet Annie), clover (Melilotus species), cocklebur, curly dock (Rumex species), pigweed, plantain, ragweed.

Goldenrod (Solidago) has an undeserved bad reputation. The heavy, sticky pollen goldenrods produce is rarely the cause of hay fever, and then only for a gardener who has developed a sensitivity over many years’ exposure and who accidentally wipes a pollen-bearing glove across her nose.
LEFT: One pollen-producing male cone on a pine may release millions of pollen grains each year. Other conifers and wind-pollinated plants are also prolific—it’s been estimated that if all of Sweden’s conifers dropped their pollen evenly across that country, each square meter would be coated with 300 million pollen grains. Yet pine, fir and spruce are not high on the list of allergy-inducing plants. RIGHT: Like many plants that spur allergic reactions, ragweed doesn’t look like it’s blooming even when it’s in full flower, as here. Yet jar a stalk and just watch the pollen come out in a cloud!

Don’t count on numbers to gauge allergic impact
It’s not the number of pollen grains that causes trouble but their type and an individual person’s response to that type. A similar number of pollen grains—several million—may fall from one male pine cone or one dangling birch catkin, but fewer people react to pine pollen than to birch. An oak’s tassel-like flower may produce at only half the birch’s rate, and a grass plume releases just 1/20th of the pollen, but those grains have a major impact on the person whose body reacts to oak or grass.

Allergic to one, allergic to a group
When we react to pollen it’s actually a response to particular proteins on the surface of that pollen grain. A body allergic to a particular pollen protein often reacts to that protein in other, unrelated substances. For instance, birch pollen is a very common cause of hay fever. People allergic to birch often have food allergies involving hazelnut, almond, walnut and apple.

Recognizing wind-, insect- and bird-pollinated flowers

If you see bees on a flower like this aster, it is almost certainly an insect-pollinated species. Bees are too busy to take time to smell the flowers!
Hummingbird- and butterfly-pollinated flowers tend to be tubular and require a hovering approach, like this cooking sage (Salvia officinalis).
The tiny flowers that open on these ornamental grass plumes will dangle in the breeze, all the better to spread their pollen.

Wind-pollinated flowers give themselves away with their inconspicuousness and dangle. Most lack petals, which would interfere with the wind reaching the pollen grains. Most dangle from the plant’s top or upper branches, the better to be caught by a breeze.

Insect-pollinated plants tend to have visually attractive blooms—brightly colored, large or clustered. Pollinators such as bees, flies and butterflies home in on the ripe flower’s color and form. Wide petals or clustered flowers afford the insects a landing pad. Examples: apple (crabapple and other fruit trees), aster, daisy (and many of its relatives), mint (and many of its relatives), rose (and its family), tulip, and yarrow.

Hummingbird- and moth-pollinated flowers are tubular or have narrow nectar-collecting spurs at the bases of their petals. Many require a hovering approach. Bees can’t squeeze into the flower, their tongues won’t reach to the depth of the nectary, or they can’t hover long enough to sip their fill. Examples: beautybush (Kolkwitzia amabilis), butterfly bush (Buddleia), columbine, coral bells (Heuchera), fuchsia, hibiscus, horse chestnut (Aesculus), impatiens, lantana, salvia, trumpet vine, and weigela.

Battle of the sexes

Ginkgo trees, too, have contributed to increased pollen counts in U.S. cities. Seeking to avoid any contact with the rank odor of the female’s fruit, we’re growing and using male ginkgos almost exclusively. In some countries where ginkgo fruit is an important crop, a buyer may have the choice of dozens of named female varieties. In the U.S., if the ginkgo tree you’re considering has a variety name on its garden center tag, it’s almost certainly a pollen-producing male.
Some perfectly good shade tree species, such as Kentucky coffee tree (Gymnocladus dioicus) are now adding to the woes of hay fever sufferers in urban areas because we’ve chosen to propagate and plant only male, pollen-producing varieties. Why overload the pollen count this way? So we won’t have to pick up the female trees’ litter—these seed pods, above.

Plants with separate sexes
Examine the plants below while they’re in bloom and you’ll find that the flowers on some never form pollen. A gardener with allergies might choose* those “female” forms and shun the pollen-making males.

  • Ash tree
  • Asparagus
  • Bayberry (Myrica pennsylvanica)
  • Black gum tree (Nyssa sylvatica)
  • Box elder
  • Cork tree (Phellodendron amurensis)
  • Fig trees (Ficus)
  • Fringetree (Chionanthus virginicus)
  • Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba)
  • Goatsbeard, perennials (Aruncus species)
  • Juniper shrubs and trees (Juniperus species)
  • Kiwi vine (Actinidia kolomikta)
  • Mulberry trees
  • Persimmon tree (Diospyros virginiana)
  • Pistache tree (Pistacia chinensis)
  • Populus species (cottonwood, poplar, quaking aspen, etc.)
  • Red maple, silver maple
  • Sumac shrubs and trees (Rhus species)
  • Thalictrum species, perennials (meadow rue)
  • Willow trees and shrubs
  • Yew shrubs and trees

* Look for a sex-indicative variety name on garden center labels, or the presence of seeds or fruits (telltale of a female). If these signs are lacking, the only way to know the sex of the plant you are growing or considering buying is to inspect its blossoms for the presence or absence of pollen.

Some female, pollen-less varieties of separate-sex species:

  • American bittersweet vine ‘Indian Maiden’
  • Bayberry shrub ‘Myda’
  • Corkscrew willow (Salix matsudana ‘Tortuosa’)
  • Evergreen hollies such as “China Girl,’ ‘Blue Princess,’ and ‘Blue Maid’
  • Junipers: Juniperus chinensis ‘San Jose,’ ‘Sea Green’; J. horizontalis ‘Blue Rug,’ ‘Grey Carpet’; J. sabina ‘Skandia’; J. virginiana ‘Blue Mountain,’ ‘Cupressifolia,’ ‘Emerald Sentinel’
  • Kentucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus)
  • Michigan hollies such as ‘Winterberry’ and ‘Sprite’
  • Red maple ‘Red Sunset,’ ‘Scarlet Sentinel’
  • Sumac ‘Gro-low,’ ‘Laciniata,’ ‘Dissecta’
  • Weeping willow (Salix babylonica), most oft-cultivated form is female
  • Yew ‘Brownii,’ ‘Densiformis,’ ‘Emerald Spreader,’ ‘Fastigiata,’ ‘Repandens,’ ‘Sentinalis,’ ‘Wardii’ (Note: When grown without male company, these females will bear no fruit.)

Some male varieties sold as pollinators or ‘seedless’ forms:

  • Ash tree ‘Autumn Purple,’ ‘Marshall’s Seedless’
  • Bayberry shrub ‘Myriman’
  • Box elder tree ‘Sensation’
  • Cork tree ‘His Majesty,’ ‘Macho,’ ‘Shademaster’
  • Cottonwood ‘Colmar,’ ‘Red Caudina,’ ‘Siouxland’
  • Evergreen holly** ‘Blue Stallion,’ ‘Blue Prince,’ ‘China Boy,’ etc.
  • Fringetree (Chionanthus) ‘Floyd’
  • Ginkgo tree, most named varieties including ‘Autumn Gold,’ ‘Princeton Sentry,’ ‘Shangri-la’
  • Junipers: Juniperus chinensis ‘Pfitzeriana,’ ‘Pfitzeriana Glauca’; J. horizontalis ‘Bar Harbor,’ ‘Jade River,’ ‘Jade Spreader,’ ‘Plumosa’; J. sabina ‘Broadmoor’; J. virginiana ‘Manhattan Blue’
  • ‘Lombardy’ poplar
  • Michigan holly** ‘Apollo,’ etc.
  • Mulberry ‘Chaparral’
  • Red maple ‘Autumn Blaze,’ ‘Autumn Flame,’ ‘Celebration,’ ‘Karpick,’ ‘Northwood,’ (most males are less red in spring than females)
  • Silver maple ‘Silver Queen’ (you read that right, the queen’s a “he”)

** These species’ males are not the worst of the lot, as their pollen is heavy, rather than wind-borne.

Article by Janet Macunovich and photos by Steven Nikkila, www.gardenatoz.com.

RELATED: Dangerous Plants – A Healthy Respect Will Keep You Healthy

RELATED: Plants, Pollen and Allergies

Replacement options for a dying ash tree

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Ginkgos in the fall can be spectacular, the fan-shaped leaves glowing gold. Sometimes the color is a less showy yellow-green, but whatever the fall color, the leaves drop quickly soon after and all at once, a leaf raker’s dream.

Part 2 of 2 – Trees for root spaces greater than 10 feet wide

When an ash tree is the friendly cover above your patio or picnic table, and it is doomed to fall to the plague of emerald ash borer, its loss is a personal one. Here’s some consolation: in that location, with park-like room for roots to spread, many species can be expected to grow well and quickly.

Choose from this list and score one for diversity. By planting one of these excellent but underused species, you’ll help diminish the chance of whole-neighborhood defoliation during some future insect or disease attack. 

Trees for root spaces at least 10 feet wide

These trees need larger boulevards and islands, where roots have at least 10 feet to spread in all directions:

Ginkgo (Ginkgo biloba, fruitless male varieties such as ‘Autumn Gold’ and ‘Santa Cruz’) 50 to 80’ tall with a variable spread (‘Santa Cruz’ is very wide, ‘Autumn Gold’ just a bit more than half as wide as tall). Grows 12” or more per year in its youth, slower as it matures. Flowers are inconspicuous. Fall color can be a superb gold. Female trees are not desirable as the fallen fruit is malodorous. Full sun. Prefers deep, moist, sandy soil but will tolerate almost any situation.

Hackberry (Celtis occidentalis) 40 to 60’ tall and wide, may be larger. Grows 1 to 2’ per year. Grows in almost any soil and moisture condition, in full sun. Makes no show of flower or fall color. Hard-seeded, berry-like fruit loved by birds and small mammals. This is another of many native trees that are just being discovered for use in the landscape. Like the ash, it’s a tree that rarely stars, yet always fills a supporting role. Some selections have been made, such as ‘Prairie Pride’ with especially lustrous leaves and a broad crown or ‘Windy City’ for a fast growth rate and especially wide spread reminiscent of its relative, the American elm.

Hardy rubber tree (Eucommia ulmoides) 40 to 60’ tall and wide. Grows 12 to 18” per year. Lustrous dark green foliage that’s pest free (and so it’s wonderful to sit under!). Inconspicuous bloom. No fall color. Full sun and almost any type and condition of soil. This tree fits the bill for people who want a non-fussy, relatively fast-growing, pest-free shade tree that does not drop fruit or seeds.

Turkish filbert (Corylus colurna) 40 to 50’ tall and about half as wide. Grows 12-18” per year. Nothing worth seeing in its tiny flowers or fall color. Nuts ripen in fall. Dark green foliage is pest free. In full sun and well-drained soil can tolerate almost any other adverse condition, including the droughty soils that cause scorch on maples.

Yellowwood is a little known native that’s nearly pest free, a true showstopper in bloom or fall color, and excellent for shade on small properties by virtue of its wide spread.

Yellowwood (Cladrastis kentukea) 30 to 50’ tall. Wider than tall. Grows about 12” per year. Fragrant white flowers in large pendant clusters in June. Smooth gray bark. Full sun and well-drained soil.

Trees that should not have any restriction to their roots

These are trees that belong in back yards, parks and wide open spaces.

Bald cypress strikes many people as an evergreen, then surprises them in fall by dropping its needles.

American linden (Tilia americana) 60 to 80’ tall and 2/3 as wide. Grows 12 to 18” per year. Small white flowers in June are fragrant enough to carry across a yard and very attractive to bees—thus this is called “bee tree.” Fall color sometimes yellow. Full sun to half sun. Almost any soil.

LEFT: American linden is a stately, dependable shade tree—pyramidal in its youth, showy in bloom, and comfortably rounded in old age. RIGHT: Bur oak has no showy flowers and its fall color is dull yellow. But it is rich in character with deeply ridged, corky bark—an outline to admire while you lie in its shade.

Bald cypress (Taxodium distichum) 50 to 70’ tall and half as wide. Pyramidal. Grows 1 to 2’ per year. Fern-like foliage emerges yellow green and fades to yellow or orange-brown before dropping in fall. Shaggy red-brown bark and buttressed trunk base are attractive. Full sun. Moist to wet soil.

Black gum is all you could want in a shade tree—high branched, not messy, and great fall color. However, it is not tolerant of compacted, dry or highly alkaline soils, so plant it to replace a back yard tree, not one by the street or sidewalk!

Black gum (Nyssa sylvatica) 30 to 50’ tall and 2/3 as wide. Grows 12” per year. Its bloom is inconspicuous but fall color is stupendous, from yellow orange to deepest scarlet. Small fruits ripen in early fall and are eaten by birds. Full sun or part shade. Deep, moist, well-drained soil. Don’t site it in harsh winds.

Bur oak (Quercus macrocarpa) 70 to 80’ tall and wide. Can be larger. 8 to 12” growth per year. Nothing to note in terms of flower or fall color. Full sun. Most any soil. More tolerant of city conditions than almost any other oak.

Dawn redwood (Metasequoia glyptostroboides) 70 to 100’ tall, 25’ wide. The tree is an impressive pyramidal form. Grows 3’ a year. Inconspicuous flower. Foliage is ferny, very attractive and sometimes red-orange in fall. Bark is shaggy red-brown, easy to like. Full sun. Prefers moist, well-drained soil but is very tolerant of wet soil. Pest problems are very rare.

LEFT: Dawn redwood may keep its lowest branches into old age and sweep the ground, or branches can be pruned to accommodate traffic. The author was not a believer until she saw dawn redwood as a magnificent street tree in Manhattan. RIGHT: Kentucky coffeetree in winter is a stately form indeed.

Kentucky coffeetree (Gymnocladus dioicus) 60 to 75’ tall, not as wide as tall. Can be larger. Grows about 12” per year. Flower is insignificant. Female trees can bear large, hard pods; if this is unacceptable, hold out for the male variety ‘Prairie Titan’ or ‘Stately Manor.’ Fall color may be a good yellow. It can aggravate fastidious rakers since in the fall the leaves, the ribs that connect the leaflets, and the seed pods drop at different times. Full sun. Deep, moist soils are best, but the tree will tolerate almost any city condition. This tree got its name when early American settlers used the seeds as a coffee substitute, but we are now told its seeds are toxic.

Lacebark elm is a dependable, fast-growing, wide-spreading shade tree with gorgeous bark. It has an additional common name, Chinese elm, that causes some people to confuse it with an inferior tree, Siberian elm.

Lacebark elm (Ulmus parvifolia) 40 to 50’ tall and wide. Grows 1 to 2’ per year. Inconspicuous flower. Fall color may be yellow or red-purple. Mottled, peeling bark is a plus in winter. Full sun. Moist, well-drained soil is best but it tolerates many soil conditions.

Swamp white oaks are faster-growing than most people realize, so we can enjoy them in their youth as well as leave them to our grandchildren.

Sawtooth oak (Quercus acutissima) 40 to 60’ tall and wide. Grows 2’ per year during its first twenty years. Golden catkin flowers in spring can be attractive. Foliage is very clean, deep green in summer, often a good yellow in fall. Acorns drop early in fall. An impressive, high-branched shade tree. Full sun. Well-drained soil.

Shingle oaks can frustrate some gardeners by holding onto leaves through winter. Others see the leaves as winter interest. Isn’t diversity grand!

Shingle oak (Quercus imbricaria) 50 to 60’ tall and wide. Can be larger. Grows 12 to 18” per year. Leaves unfurl red, are lustrous dark green in summer and become yellow to red-brown in fall. Full sun. Moist, well-drained soil.

Swamp white oak (Quercus bicolor) 50 to 60’ tall and wide. Can be larger. Grows about 12″ per year. With age, develops an impressive, stout trunk and deeply furrowed bark. Fall color can range from yellow to maroon. Full sun. Moist to wet soil.

Read More: Part 1 – Trees for root spaces less than 10 feet wide

Article by Janet Macunovich and photos by Steven Nikkila, www.gardenatoz.com.

Replacement options for a dying ash tree

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Part 1 of 2 – Ash replacement trees for root spaces less than 10 feet wide

Chinese fringetree is a workhorse that also blooms once a year and supplies fruit for the birds. Remember, the ash trees we’re replacing offered no flower and only brief yellow fall color. Their greatest quality was dependable growth even in tough places.

Emerald ash borer has erased millions of native ash trees from our landscapes and forests. It’s hard to believe that similar devastation happened just decades ago, when millions of American elms fell to Dutch elm disease, or that America has also experienced the loss of certain poplars, black locusts and virtually all of its millions of acres of American chestnuts since 1850.

Perhaps we can stop history from repeating itself. After every previous loss, we planted as America always has—in a big way, in masses. As a result, our urban forest is dominated by just a few species, notably various maples, honeylocusts and littleleaf lindens. To protect ourselves from future widespread loss we have to break that pattern and plant a greater diversity of trees around our homes and on our waysides.

Even before the onset of emerald ash borer, concerned arborists had put a moratorium on ash and maple planting and begun planting less common trees. Tree planting became a matter of mixing species within a city block, rather than planting lines of hundreds of the same species, even the same clone of a species. They are making sure that trees won’t in the future be exposed and lost in blocks of hundreds and thousands, as they are now being lost.

For that next epidemic will occur. In this age where materials are whisked from one side of the world to another, complete plant quarantine and protection from new pests is impossible. You can take the same smart step and plant one of many wonderful tree species that are not in the “big three” when you replace that lost ash.

Choose from the following line-up. It’s a catalog sorted by the amount of root space the tree will have to grow in. After looking into all of them, I have an interest in so many that where my family removed 20 dying ashes from a relative’s property, we’ll probably replant with 20 different species from this list!

Trees for spaces where roots can spread just 5 feet wide

These trees can tolerate the restricted root space of small islands and the narrowest strips between sidewalk and street. Some may need pruning to remove lower branches as they grow, creating clearance for traffic below the main branches.

Chinese fringetree (Chionanthus retusus). 15-25’ tall, may be taller. Slow to grow, less than 12” per year. Often shrubby in habit, to attain tree form must have lower limbs removed as it grows. Hardy within the Detroit Metro area but may not be hardy in the colder parts of zone 5 in suburbs. Bright white confetti flowers in June. Blue-black fruit in fall is relished by birds but borne only on female trees, if a male fringetree is nearby. Fall color may be yellow. Grows in full sun or part shade. Prefers deep, moist soil but is very tolerant of a wide range of soil conditions.

Crabapples such as ‘Sugar Tyme’ are most often listed with ornamental trees, but those between two and three stories tall serve well as shade trees. It may be necessary to remove lower limbs while the tree is young to provide clearance for pedestrians and other traffic.

Crabapples (Malus varieties with known disease resistance such as ‘Adams,’ ‘Prairifire,’ ‘Red Jewel,’ and ‘Sugar Tyme’). 15’ (‘Red Jewel’), 18’ (‘Sugar Tyme’), 20’ (‘Prairifire’), 24’ (‘Adams’), rounded or slightly narrower than tall. Grows about 12” per year. Flowers white (‘Red Jewel’), pale pink (‘Adams’, ‘Sugar Tyme’) or dark red-purple (‘Prairifire’). Fruit small, red and persisting prettily into and even through winter. Birds eat the fruit in late winter. Full sun, well-drained soil.

Hawthorns are game for drier, windier places than many trees and their fruit is a favorite for songbirds. For safety’s sake around your home, choose a thornless variety such as ‘Crusader’ or the nearly-thornless ‘Princeton Sentry.’

Hawthorns (thornless types such as Crataegus phaenopyrum ‘Princeton Sentry,’ Washington hawthorn, and C. crusgalli var. inermis, Crusader hawthorn). 20 to 25’ tall and wide. 12-15” growth per year. White flowers (with unpleasant odor—Crusader) come later than crabapples but help these trees masquerade as crabs. Fall color orange to red or purple. Crusader keeps its small reddish fruit into early winter, ‘Princeton Sentry’ until spring; birds are attracted to both. Full sun and any type of soil so long as it is well-drained.

Japanese tree lilacs are most often single-trunked, like this young one that will thus be very good one day as a small shade tree.

Japanese tree lilac (Syringa reticulata). 20 to 30’ tall and not quite as wide. Grows 12 to 18” per year. Creamy white, fragrant flowers open in June, weeks after common lilac. No significant fall color but the polished red brown bark brightens a winter day. Full sun. Well-drained soil.

Kousa dogwood has a reputation as “the dogwood for the sun” but this is misleading. Although more tolerant of full sun than its cousin, the earlier blooming flowering dogwood (Cornus florida), it prefers some shade. In the sun, it’s known for developing drooping leaves and failing to attain the much-sought horizontal branching.

Kousa dogwood (Cornus kousa). About 20’ tall and wide, can be larger. Grows about 12” per year. Often sold as a multi-stemmed or very low-branched specimen, but single trunk kousa dogwoods make excellent small shade trees if lower limbs are discouraged or removed. White flowers in June that persist into July. Varieties with pink flowers, larger or later blooms are available. Large rosy fruits favored by birds in late summer. Bark develops polished tricolor effect as the tree ages, very attractive in winter. Fall color may be good maroon. Part shade is best but will tolerate full sun. Moist, well-drained soil.

Redbud. Who would have thought that the romantic woodland tree that blooms in early May as if flocked with thousands of red-violet flowers would be such a winner in parkstrips along roads and driveways. Needs pruning while young to remove lower limbs for pedestrian and vehicular traffic.

Redbud (Cercis canadensis). 20 to 30’ tall and wide. Very fast growth when young, slowing to 12 to 18” per year. Flowers are tiny but numerous, red-violet nubs all along the branches in May. Fall color can be a clear yellow. Bark is near-black with crevices revealing orange beneath. Some people object to the shaggy winter look in a year when many seed pods form. Best in half sun or full sun in moist, well-drained soil but is very tolerant of almost all light and soil conditions except soggy soils.

Serviceberry is a native with international appeal. You can buy named varieties such as ‘Autumn Brilliance,’ ‘Cumulus,’ ‘Prince Charles’ and ‘Snowcloud,’ which have been selected by growers in Europe and the U.S. for traits such as tight upright form, larger flowers, more consistent fall color or resistance to the few leaf diseases that may harry this tree.

Serviceberry (Amelanchier species). 25’ tall, may be taller; 15-20’ wide. Grows 1-2’ per year. Fragrant white flowers in early May. Edible, sweet, blueberry-sized fruit in midsummer loved by birds. Fall color variable each year, yellow to deep red-orange. Smooth gray bark. Best in sun or half-sun in moist, well-drained soil.

Trees for root spaces between 5 and 10 feet wide:

Amur cork tree assumes such an interesting broad shape and open crown that it invites you to come into its shade.

Amur cork tree (Phellodendron amurense, fruitless varieties such as ‘Shademaster’ and ‘His Majesty’). 30 to 45’ tall, often broader than tall. Grows 12 to 18” per year. No showy bloom. Brief yellow fall color. Very open crown provides light shade and beauty of line in winter. Handsome corky bark develops in its old age. Full sun. Most soils are okay.

Golden rain tree provides welcome showy bloom in mid- or even late summer but is not well-known, so it has not been widely planted.

Golden rain tree (Koelreuteria paniculata). 30 to 40’ tall and wide. Grows 1 to 2’ per year to form a round crown of widely spaced branches for light shade. Flowers are large yellow conical clusters in late June, but bloom time is variable from plant to plant; some don’t flower until August. Seed pods are showy, like yellow-green Chinese lanterns draping the tree in bunches. No fall color. Full sun to part sun. Any well-drained soil. Tolerates high alkaline soils, drought and heat.

Hophornbeam or ironwood (Ostrya virginiana). 25 to 40’ tall and wide. Grows 8 to 12” per year. No significant flower or fall color, just a dependable small shade tree. Full sun to half shade. Well-drained soil. 

Hornbeams have lustrous foliage and sensuous bark. They also tend to hold their foliage long into the winter and so are often planted to serve as tall hedges.

Hornbeam (Carpinus betulus, European; C. caroliniana, American). 40-60’ tall, 30-40’ wide. 8 to 12” growth per year. American hornbeam or musclewood smaller by half and slower to grow than European. Inconspicuous flower. Fall color late, yellow, variable by year. Smooth steel gray bark more or less fluted like a well-muscled, flexed biceps. Best in full sun and well-drained soil.

Katsura foliage is captivating for its rich color in summer, lack of insect and disease damage, and the sound it makes in a wind.

Katsura (Cercidiphyllum japonicum). 40’ tall, may be taller; variable in width. Blue-green foliage is purple while leafing out, yellow in fall. Grows 1-2’ per year. No significant flower or fruit. Best in rich, moist, well-drained soil in full sun.

Mountain silverbell tends to be low-branched, so it may need pruning of lower limbs while young to obtain clearance for traffic in its shade.

Mountain silverbell (Halesia monticola). 60’ tall by about 40’ wide, upright or conical in form. Grows 12-18” per year. White or pale pink bell flowers hang from the branches in May. Fall color is not usually notable. Part sun is best. Moist, well-drained soil.

READ MORE: Replacement options for dying ash trees – Part 2

Article and illustrations by Janet Macunovich and photos by Steven Nikkila, www.gardenatoz.com.

Janet’s Journal: Picking a size: Buy plants big or start them small?

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Once, we felt fortunate to find the type of plant we wanted. Now, what was unusual is common and the problem is deciding which size to buy. How to choose between pots of varying sizes, divisions, cells or even balled and burlapped? Here’s some help.

Here we are at the garden center, wrestling once again with that essential question: When picking a size, is it better to pay more, for immediate satisfaction, by buying the largest specimen? Or is a smaller plant the wiser investment?

The answer is a classic: It depends. But current research is providing objective, specific and sometimes surprising information that may weigh in your decision.

While growing in the field, this river birch had a root mass in balance with its branch spread, 6 feet wide or more. Its garden center root ball may seem large and is certainly heavy, yet it’s not 6 feet but 2-1/2 feet across and contains just 5 to 18 percent of the fine roots the tree had in the field. (Estimate per Gary Watson, Morton Arboretum, in Extension bulletins issued by several Midwest States and in his book Principles and Practices of Planting Trees and Shrubs.)

General buying guideline: Roots rule and water pays the bills

No matter what plant you’re buying, choose the package that delivers more roots in a wider formation, and plan to water attentively until the plant resumes growing as well as it did in its production field.

All plant parts begin as soft growth—as leaf, shoot or root tip. 95 percent of that growth is water, which enters the equation as a puddle sinking into the soil, pushing into soft root tips and being drawn up by photosynthesis to the leafy part of the plant. The winner in any growing contest will be the plant with enough roots to serve its whole top, spread to cover a wider surface that “catches” a bigger puddle.

Roots develop only when leaves produce more sugar and starch—energy—than they need to sustain themselves and woody parts nearby. As the root system expands, more water can enter a plant, which can then support more leaves. So leaves and roots grow in balance, equal in mass and in width of spread.

These viburnum shrubs are being grown in the flat pan method, for minimal root loss at transplant time. They’re given a relatively shallow but very wide circle of loose soil in which to grow. At sale time, each is lifted with roots intact, weighing much less than if it had been dug to make a traditionally-configured root ball.

When a plant must be dug from one place to be planted in another, root loss is inevitable. When the plant is grown in a container that prevents roots from spreading as wide as the branches, it can’t make use of natural, wide puddles but becomes reliant on a near-constant flow of water through its small area of ground, via frequent watering or trickle irrigation.

It may be a year or more before a transplant’s leaves manufacture significant spare energy and roots begin to recoup their loss. As long as the roots remain “behind,” the plant will grow fewer new leaves each spring than it should. In such a year, total root growth can’t measure up to potential, either. A few or many years can pass during which the top remains the same size or even shrinks and the roots slowly increase, until balance and normal growth resumes.

If you have your choice in seedling trees, choose the largest root collar diameter—girth at the base of the stem. This measure is regarded by producers of seedlings for reforestation as the best single predictor of the tree’s survival and growth in the field.

Trees: Smaller is often better

When instant gratification is an operative factor, you can’t persuade yourself or anyone else to buy small. But if you think putting a larger tree in the ground is a jump start toward a shaded yard or the glory of a full-sized ornamental tree, think again. Small trees often catch up to larger trees planted at the same time and may keep growing faster for decades.

Tree roots grow out, not down. So to stay balanced in mass and spread with the top, they spread wider than the branches. Even small trees have wide root systems. If a conventional pot or root ball was cut wide enough to encompass all of a substantial tree’s roots, it would be an unmanageable package for grower, garden center employee and you. Thus all trees sold at a garden center are unbalanced with the possible exception of bare root trees, seedlings or “whips,” and those grown in the unfortunately-uncommon flat-pan method.

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The larger the top of the tree, the more out of balance its for-sale root ball. So the largest trees take the longest to regain balance and resume growth.

We buy trees rated according to their trunk diameter: “one-inch caliper,” “two-inch caliper,” etc. Studies show there is a direct relationship between this trunk size and root re-establishment time. For every inch in trunk diameter, a properly-sited, well-watered tree will take at least one year and possibly longer to recoup its losses. Smaller trees recover faster than larger trees—one year for a one-inch tree, five years or more for a four-inch tree.

That means a one-inch tree may shake off its shock and resume growing roots at a normal rate even during its transplant year. For most tree species, it’s normal to lengthen each root about 18 inches during a typical, zone 4-5 growing season. With that much new root, the tree is able to produce leaves and extend its branches to full potential the following spring—18 inches or more for fast-growing species like silver maple or river birch, 12 to 18 inches for moderate growers such as red oak and katsura, and 6 to 12 inches for slow-growing American hornbeam or bur oak.

Meanwhile, a four-inch caliper tree will take five years to return to this norm. It may extend its roots and its branches only an inch or two in year one, and continue to creep in growth over the next four years.

Exception: In seedling trees, pick the largest

So where you want one or a few trees, the fastest possible growth, shortest term of critical care and healthiest trees in the long run, buy small rather than large.

However, if your aim is to replant a forest or start your own grove of trees, seedlings or unbranched young trees called “whips” are usually the way to go. In that case, bigger is better. Given a choice of many whips, choose those which are thickest at their stem base. If all have the same size stem base but some are taller, choose the taller.

Pacific Regeneration Technologies, a network of reforestation nurseries in Canada and the U.S., has compared survival and growth rates of smaller and larger seedlings in the field. Although there are many variables that can affect these plantings, PRT’s findings are persuasive—thicker and taller seedlings have higher survival and growth rates. In one study of Douglas fir, the differences in survival and height remained almost unchanged even 21 years after planting.

Shrubs: Hedging changes the bet

Shrubs and trees are the same in many ways, including best planting size. The wider the roots and the closer they are to being balanced with the top, the more quickly that shrub will “take” and the better its long-term prospects.

Shrubs to be used as hedging are exceptions. Smaller shrubs, even seedlings, almost always outgrow larger plants when planted in close rows. A hedge begun with smaller plants is ultimately fuller, healthier and requires less care. Even most important, the hedge grown from seedlings or small shrubs is less likely to suffer middle-of-the-row losses as it ages.

Competition for water is why large-plant hedges fall short in speed and fullness, compared to hedges begun with smaller plants. Larger plants have larger root balls and once planted, each one has proportionately less root-growing space.

When roots are in direct competition with other roots, they grow slowly, if at all. It makes no difference that competing roots are from a related plant and the two sets of roots, if growing vigorously, could graft and become a single system. A line of large plants with root balls tucked one against the next is a line of plants with only half its roots free to grow. At best, those plants can grow at half capacity.

In addition, smaller plants have been sheared fewer times, so they’re less dense and cast less shade on other plants’ bases. A hedge grown from whips becomes and remains full at the bottom. Larger shrubs, pruned repeatedly for fullness before being sold to the hedge planter, thin out at the base and rarely regain density as they grow together.

A hedge that began with crowded roots remains weak. The weakest individuals are in the center, where competition was most fierce, side roots atrophied and each plant’s root mass remained small. Years and even decades later the hedge crowded at planting is most likely to be affected by drought, severe winters or seasons of high insect or disease occurrence. The plant in that hedge most likely to die is one in the middle.

Every perennial is divisible. Making one from many gives each division a faster start and better long-term outlook. The peony division on the right could grow roots freely from only one side when snugged up to its sister shoots. Separated, it can grow to all sides. Within the mother clump, it might have initiated two shoots, and stored energy to make four the next year. Alone, it might form three or four shoots this year and create enough stored energy to break ground with five or six stems next spring.

Perennials: Buy what you can afford, but give them rooting space

Trees, shrubs, vines and bulbs are perennials, as are those plants in the group most commonly called perennial—herbaceous flowering species from anemone to zebra grass. I hope you’ll keep in mind that every perennial is alike in a way that should influence your choice in plant size. That is, they all store energy this year for next year’s growth.

So buy perennials for the roots. Select the biggest, widest root system.

Avoid root-bound plants of any kind. Plants absorb most water and grow new roots primarily from root tips. Since this plant’s roots turned at pot edge and grew down, all of those tips are now crowded at the bottom, a very small area, but now it’s all the plant has from which to draw water. Since roots will drain that spot more quickly than water from surrounding soil can move in, the plant may dry out even if the soil around the root ball is moist. Also, new roots erupting from that tiny spot will each be in close competition with the others. The process of expanding its root system will be slow. (Although it’s a setback to the plant, my best bet is to cut the roots to create new root ends in more areas.)
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As far as the roots spread by the fall of one year, that’s as much area as the plant’s top will cover the following year. So do everything you can to encourage roots to spread during their first year.

If you buy perennials of any type for immediate impact, you will probably also plant them close together. That’s fine, if this year’s show is all that counts. However, to make the most of those plants over the long run, understand that crowded roots won’t grow as much this year as they could, so next year’s top growth will be less and plants will be weaker overall. If you must crowd for immediate show, enjoy the display then dig and replant the component parts farther apart.

To cover the most ground for the least money, buy smaller perennials. (But not too small—see the notes about annuals and vegetables, below.) If the plant you want is available only in large pots, buy those and divide them as you plant.

Annuals and vegetables: Pay-off’s in the larger cell

For healthy, lush annuals and vegetables, space them as directed. That is, if the pot tag says “space plants 12 inches apart,” give every one its own square foot. A flat of 48 plants can cover 48 square feet—a 4-foot by 12-foot bed.

Want a more spectacular show, sooner? Do what botanical gardens do—keep the spacing the same but start with bigger plants. The higher cost per square foot pays off in immediate display.

Since most studies are on vegetables, we need to apply that data to annuals—there are enough parallels to make the comparison worthwhile. For instance, vegetables that flower earlier go to market sooner. Those that are healthier bear larger fruit and have fewer pests, so more of the fruit is cosmetically perfect and sells for a higher price. We value early flowering and health in bedding plants, too.

Trials run in Michigan, Kentucky, Missouri, Georgia and Minnesota on tomatoes, broccoli, cabbage, pepper and watermelon planted from various size cells, showed that the largest transplants yielded earlier and/or more. From larger sets the first picking of tomatoes and peppers was up to twice as great. The broccoli crop was 25 percent more, cabbages 16 percent heavier and watermelon harvest 7 percent higher. We flower growers may not be big on math, but we can still see that sometimes it can be worth spending 50 percent more for the chance at doubling the show!

Parting shot: Small plants more foolproof

Still not sure what to do? In such cases, I buy small. It pays off, especially when I’m not sure what the plant can do or where it will grow best.

Big, bushy plants can fool me by looking big and bushy even as they lose ground—who notices ten leaves gone when there were 200 to start?

A plant that comes to me with just ten leaves tells me clearly, week by week, how things are going. If it’s thriving, its leaf count increases and the new foliage matches the old in size and color. If it begins to lose ground, that’s also quickly apparent. If it seems a move is in order to correct the situation, that’s simpler with a small plant too!

Article and illustrations by Janet Macunovich and photos by Steven Nikkila, www.gardenatoz.com.

ALSO… How Much are the trees in your yard worth?

ELSEWHERE: Planting a tree successfully requires the correct planting depth

Janet’s Journal: The Five Plants You Meet in Heaven

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With apologies to Mitch Albom and thanks to Mike Bosnich…

On the day she died, Diane was working on her rain garden. She had become known in the neighborhood as ‘the woman digging the ditch.’ The small children of the neighborhood had told her this. Little kids liked her. To them, she wasn’t the woman digging the ditch but “the lady with the flowers.”

This oak may be 400 years old. It has seen much in four centuries, but nothing quite so devastating as building construction. It may seem quite far from the house that was constructed, but its roots were affected. Note the dead limbs and the flat top that developed when central limbs slowed in growth or declined.

She dug, week by week for over a year, not a ditch, but depressed channels beginning at downspouts then joining, sloping and widening toward the wet area. She disconnected the downspouts from plastic drain tiles that had emptied into the storm drain. Now, rainwater from the roof coursed along the route she’d chosen and settled into that low space.

She’d planted tiny divisions of wetland plants there, and retained the edge of the sunken area with rough cedar logs and fieldstone. She was almost done, the day she died.

It came quickly. An aneurysm, they’d tell her husband.

What she knew was being very tired suddenly, and sitting down at the edge of the rain garden, thinking of salamanders. Light flashed. She closed her eyes.

She opened them to see the oak.

Selma’s massive white oak. Someone who knew trees had guessed it was 400 years old when Selma and her husband built their house nearby.

Shaking her head as if to clear a mirage, Diane stood. Under her feet she found not her rain garden but Selma’s patio. As she looked out across the big yard to the huge tree, a soft rumble filled her head, then sorted itself into words.

Rain garden. Modern building practice has been to grade properties toward streets, packing the surface soil so rainwater runs off, along paved surfaces and into storm drains. A great deal of pollutants run with it. City planners are trying now to correct this problem by advocating the use of rain gardens—wide, shallow depressions that are natural water filters where water can slow and sink in.

“You’ve come. I’ve waited for you.”

“Who…? What…?” she wondered.

“Me. You call me oak. We were acquainted. After I died I was given the job of waiting here until you died.”

“You died? Oh, what a shame… Wait. I died?”

“We died. Don’t be alarmed. You just need time to see it. My death took much longer than yours. I was given more time to prepare. Now, we’re both here and I can tell you about how you killed me.”

“I killed you? No! I helped Selma save you!”

“You had good intentions. I knew that. Now, I must tell you how it came out, and introduce you to others you affected. Sit. Listen.”

She sat.

“I grew in this good place a long time, and was still growing,” rumbled the oak. “People camped. Collected my nuts to grind into meal. Happy people, singers. With many children. They came and went, carrying their homes with them.”

“Indians?” Diane wondered.

“I suppose. Hunters. Fishers. They stopped coming when the farmers came. The farmers rested horses beneath my branches, and plowed above my roots.”

“Then, machines came. They tore down into my roots, there where you are sitting. They crushed the ground between us, heaped soil over my roots, and packed it down. You told Selma to help me.”

“Yes!”

“She did, with water and by loosening that soil. But it took many seasons to grow those roots that were taken from me, and other ones died when they could not breathe. I would have needed many, many seasons to heal.”

“I told Selma to put mulch under you, to get rid of the grass. You were looking better!”

“Yes, at first. You told her also that she could plant bulbs. Spring bulbs, you said, that could bloom each year before my new leaves came. They were very pretty flowers. They didn’t mean to kill me, any more than you did.”

“But how…”

“Selma got older, slower. She wanted more bulbs but thought she couldn’t plant them herself. She hired people. They planted bigger, fancier flowers, more every year. They used drills to make holes. They cut more roots each time. I couldn’t keep up.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It happens. But look—I’m here, but also still there.”

“There? That other house?”

“Selma’s children. They sent me to a mill, and built a house, a table, a stairway of me.”

“Why tell me this? 

“Because that’s how it works. We leave there, we come here, we look at how we are all connected.”

“I never meant…”

“I know. But now you see how things add up. I learned too. About smaller trees I shaded out, squirrels I nourished, small children who fell from my branches.”

“Now,” said the oak, “you must meet the others.”

“Others? Wait…”

But the light dimmed, and she was back where she’d died, in her rain garden.

She was standing and looking toward the neighbor’s.

“Come here!” sang a merry chorus. She saw a cluster of cheery white strawberry flowers, each canted toward her.

“So glad to see you, so glad to say thank you,” they trilled.

“For what?” she asked, stepping toward them.

“For water! Yes! For chicken manure! Oh, yes!” They appeared to be calling and answering, a song in two parts.

“But you’re not in my garden,” Diane said, crouching to watch them more closely.

“No, but we’re downhill, aren’t we?!” they said. “You left the water on. It rolled down the lawn, where it’s packed so hard. It came to us cool, and loaded with the fertilizer you spread there!”

“Well, I’ll be…” she said, looking toward her own home and noticing for the first time the slight uphill grade from the strawberry bed to her house.

“The kids came to see us, we gave them fruit. Then chipmunks, rabbits, and groundhogs. It was a party!”

“It was?” she wondered. “It isn’t any more?”

“Nothing lasts forever,” the sweet voices answered. “That channel intercepts the water now. We’ve moved on!”

“Am I supposed to learn from that? That you grew because of my sprinkler, and then I stopped it by making the rain garden?”

“Yes, learn that it happened. That things flow downhill,” they called in close harmony.

A gardener should be thorough in assessing a site, picking plants to match it, and deciding why particular plants fare well (above photo) or poorly there (bottom photo, far left plant). For instance, we think of astilbe as a shade plant, but moisture and cool temperatures may be more crucial to its health. It can grow even in full sun if the soil there does not dry out.

“Well, thank you for telling me,” she said.

“Are you done, then?” came another chorus, thinner and more raspy.

Diane looked toward the sound, to see a throng of astilbe. Droopy, singed, thin astilbe. “Oh, she said. What happened to you?”

“We dried up,” was the crackling reply. “Because Ralph did well!”

The plants’ leaves suddenly formed pointing arms. Diane looked that way to see a lush, glossy, deep green astilbe on the far edge of the strawberry bed.

“I didn’t want any trouble,” Ralph cried. “I never asked for your water and fertilizer!”

“Oh,” she said. “You too?”

“Yes, me too. I kept getting it even when the strawberries were cut off, since I’m ahead of your ditch. But my brother, Shelby, on the other side of this crabapple, didn’t.”

Diane stopped, looking at that group of scorched astilbe. Their rustling movement became a blur. The sound changed.

She looked up, into blue green leaves riffled by wind, and around at striped gray bark. At a thicket of some kind.

The riffle changed tone. It became applause.

Voices joined in. “Thank you! Brava!”

“You’re welcome,” she replied, of lifelong habit. “But, I’m sorry. I don’t know who you are. Where we are. What you are happy about.”

“Serrrrrrrr-viceberry,” the leaves said, sliding against each other. And some giggled. “You gave us this place, all this room to grow, and the ticklish feeling of these birds in our branches every summer.”

“Are you sure?” she asked, looking through the foliage to a field, a rise and a dip, and a far horizon of dark water. “I don’t think I’ve ever been here.”

“Maybe not, but the man with one leg was. You knew him. You talked, and he let us grow.”

The voices waited then, murmuring just a little among themselves. Diane looked down, thinking.

“There was a man, I saw him at the doctor’s a few times. That man?”

Applause again. “That man! You told him he could manage. Not to sell his family’s farm and move in with his daughter. He could. He did. He stopped mowing out here, though. And we grew.”

Serviceberry (Amelanchier species) are pioneer trees, often the first to populate a field once farming or mowing stops. Seeds may be dropped by passing birds. They’re native throughout Michigan, an important food source for birds and small mammals, and attractive additions to a landscape.

“So this thanks is for saying encouraging things, polite conversation?”

Laughter, light, louder, then light again, brushed back and forth through the branches. “You see! Everything we do, matters. Thank you!”

“You’re welcome,” she said, looking toward the distant water. “Hey, maybe I have been here! Is that Lake Superior? Are we in the U.P.?”

She looked back to the serviceberries, and started. They were gone. Her nose was just inches from a fence.

She began to step back. A whisper came through the spaces between the wood slats. “Wait. I need to say thanks.”

She paused, looking through the opening. Twigs scratched across the gap. “Are you on the other side of the fence?” she wondered.

“Yes. Thank you for the air,” was the scratchy response. “You told them to give us a fence that lets air through.”

“I can’t think who you mean, or which fence this is,” she apologized.

“You talked in line, at a store. They were putting up a privacy fence. You told them plants do better if there’s air. They hadn’t thought of that.”

“Well, you’re welcome,” she said, bewildered. “Can I ask a question?”

“Oh, please do!” tapped the twigs.

“First, can I see you better?”

“Certainly!” came the scritchy answer. “There’s a gate there.”

In the gateway, she froze. She saw her childhood home, its property line planted with lilac. “I told people about a fence, and those people were living in the house where I grew up?”

“Small world, isn’t it?” tapped the lilacs.

Article by Janet Macunovich and photos by Steven Nikkila, www.gardenatoz.com.

Janet’s Journal: What makes a good quality garden center?

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Good garden centers don’t have to carry everything. In fact, I prefer it when they stick to doing a superb job with plants. The coral bark maple (Acer palmatum ‘Sango Kaku’) that reflects the bridge color came from a local Michigan nursery.
Good garden centers don’t have to carry everything. In fact, I prefer it when they stick to doing a superb job with plants. The coral bark maple (Acer palmatum ‘Sango Kaku’) that reflects the bridge color came from a local Michigan nursery.

Where’s a good place to buy…? It’s a simple question, ending in the name of a flower, tree, tool or material used in the garden. When people ask, I know they want a simple answer, such as, “Flo’s Flowers on the corner of Main and Fifth Street.” Yet there’s a lot that goes into the definition of a good garden center.

First things first. Michigan is, in general, a great place to buy just about anything for the garden. I travel to garden for clients in other regions, speak at conferences, and for fun. Some people make it a habit to sample regional cuisine in their journeying. I check out garden centers. My count is now 18 states and 5 countries shopped, yet Michigan’s nurseries remain top on my list, with equals but no betters.

Perhaps we can thank our long-established garden centers for that, for setting the bar high for all who set up shop here more recently. Maybe it’s the savvy of a few managers who are influential in the field, who lead the way in taking the best of what they see and bring it here to us. Or it may be a combination of many factors including customer sophistication and demand. Regardless of why, I’m very glad that it is the case and hope that you, too, recognize and respect it.

I am most likely to become a regular buyer at a nursery if the staff understands what will happen to its plants out “in the field.” For instance, experienced staff know that they must remove, or advise that the buyer remove, tight ties such as these on a dawn redwood’s trunk. That staff knows their end of the business, that the ties may have been necessary in production or shipping, but they also know they will kill or permanently injure the tree over time.
I am most likely to become a regular buyer at a nursery if the staff understands what will happen to its plants out “in the field.” For instance, experienced staff know that they must remove, or advise that the buyer remove, tight ties such as these on a dawn redwood’s trunk. That staff knows their end of the business, that the ties may have been necessary in production or shipping, but they also know they will kill or permanently injure the tree over time.

When a garden-wise staff is in charge of up-potting or rewrapping woody plants like this laceleaf Japanese maple that have outgrown their temporary garden center containers, they know to remove any cords that remain from the original wrapping. Through their own experience, or working with returning customers and failed plants, they’ve learned that if they don’t take off girdling cords, they may be hidden by the new cover, planted with the tree, and eventually cause its death.
When a garden-wise staff is in charge of up-potting or rewrapping woody plants like this laceleaf Japanese maple that have outgrown their temporary garden center containers, they know to remove any cords that remain from the original wrapping. Through their own experience, or working with returning customers and failed plants, they’ve learned that if they don’t take off girdling cords, they may be hidden by the new cover, planted with the tree, and eventually cause its death.

Show me the way to my prize 

Now, on to specifics. The first thing I look for when I walk into a garden center that’s new to me is organization. Can I tell where to look for the item I’m seeking or is the layout such that I have to find someone and ask for help? If you think that’s a given, that’s because you’re from Michigan and you’re spoiled.You won’t often find here the unfathomable clutter that sometimes confronts and confounds me on buying trips in other states. I look for guideposts as soon as I walk in, which may be signs with arrows, maps of the store layout, or tall and easily seen markers that point the way to “Annuals,” “Shade Trees,” “Pest Control,” or “Water Garden Supplies.”

As a seasoned gardener I may be able to discern an organization by looking at the items that are grouped together: “Oh, these are all annuals, so I won’t look for perennials here,” or “Since everything there looks woody and tall, that must be where all the trees are.” But that leaves a lot of room for error. For instance, I may decide that the vine I’m looking for isn’t in stock at an establishment when in fact it’s there, mixed into the section I decided was “Shrubs” but the management has in fact assembled to display all of its “Tall things for privacy.”

Don’t roll your eyes. I’ve seen that kind of organization, and if it’s defined it’s fine. Having shopped in garden centers where the wares were arranged like the initial assembly of goods donated for a rummage sale, I truly appreciate the garden center manager who not only flags me to a spot with a banner proclaiming “Vines” but also sets up placards within the vine collection saying “More vines inside in the Tropical section.”

I can get past a lack of organization, or any one other item on the list I’m presenting you here, so long as the garden center measures up or excels in other categories, the second of which is product labeling.

Love those labels

Those who garden with me have heard me rail as we plant, about “All these blasted tags!” I gripe about them, but I can’t live without labels. Imagine shopping in a place where the plants do not bristle with identifying sticks, wear adhesive labels on their pots, or sport plastic bracelets.You can’t? Then you’ve chosen or been blessed with good garden centers so you can’t know the frustration of walking aisle after aisle without a clue of what you’re looking at, or the disappointment of growing something selected from a group in which only one front-row pot was marked, only to find a year later that it does not bloom the color, aspire to the size or live up to the character described on that marker.

What makes a good label? Common and scientific name, at the minimum. Given those, I can determine for myself the other things I wish could be on all labels: ultimate size, flower color, season of bloom, and any other significant seasonal interest such as fall color or winter berries.

All of the garden centers I love have books available for use by salespeople and interested customers. When I find that the variety of viburnum or species of soapwort for sale at that establishment is not quite the one I set out looking for, I can check for myself, right then and there, to see if the substitution would be a good one. Michael Dirr’s Manual of Woody Landscape Plants and Allan Armitage’s Herbaceous Perennial Plants are two mainstays of garden center reference materials that also include specialty catalogs and binder-collected magazine articles.

Even though it takes time to figure out if I should go with an alternate, that’s fine by me because it’s part and parcel of my third criteria for a good garden center: choices.

Organization! It’s what we need, especially when time is short during spring planting season, so that we can walk into a garden center and be certain that over here are the groundcovers, and over there are the dwarf conifers. Although we can make good guesses about organization based on appearances, signs or maps that confirm the whereabouts of various items are what make a passable garden center, great.
Organization! It’s what we need, especially when time is short during spring planting season, so that we can walk into a garden center and be certain that over here are the groundcovers, and over there are the dwarf conifers. Although we can make good guesses about organization based on appearances, signs or maps that confirm the whereabouts of various items are what make a passable garden center, great.

How can a buyer know that their garden center sells a reasonable size for the price? Buy some test plants from several sources, depot them and see if they have grown to just fill the pot (daylily, center), have been held too long so that they’ve become rootbound (ornamental grass, left) or were too-recently up-potted so that roots have not yet filled the container (right). No grower can achieve perfection in every one of hundreds of crops, but I know to buy from the ones who most frequently achieve the full-but-not-rootbound stage.
How can a buyer know that their garden center sells a reasonable size for the price? Buy some test plants from several sources, depot them and see if they have grown to just fill the pot (daylily, center), have been held too long so that they’ve become rootbound (ornamental grass, left) or were too-recently up-potted so that roots have not yet filled the container (right). No grower can achieve perfection in every one of hundreds of crops, but I know to buy from the ones who most frequently achieve the full-but-not-rootbound stage.

I’m in heaven when I can choose

A wide variety of plants, and various sizes of plant, impress me and keep me coming back.Did you know that garden centers here carry plants that I have not been able to find in Chicago, Boston or Los Angeles, even though they would be great additions to gardens there? Are you aware that our homegrown growers are on the cutting edge of new varieties and resurrected heirlooms? Take it from me, they are. I often drive to Massachusetts or Illinois to work, rather than fly, so I can take plants with me.

Does that mean that we should expect every good garden center to carry everything? No way, no possible way. There are 23,979 species listed in Hortus Third: A concise dictionary of plants cultivated in the United States and Canada. No one carries everything. It’s remarkable enough that growers hereabouts manage to grow five or six hundred different species well enough to sell. So it’s never a mark against a garden center that it doesn’t carry a particular plant.

What good garden centers do carry is a mix of the tried and true alongside the exciting and new. They stock trees and shrubs that are good for ornament as well as those that make a fine hedge or groundcover. They know their perennials well enough to feature more of the ones that they know experienced gardeners will like: non-invasive, long-interest species that may be so slow-growing that they’re little more than a collection of leaves after a year or more of growing in the pot, as well as the ones that novices must have: fast-growing, even thuggish creatures beautiful enough in bloom to catch the shopper’s eye.

The best carry plants in various-sized containers. There, I can cut my costs on one item by buying four-inch pots while splurging on another in a fifteen-gallon tub. The people who work at that good garden center, the ones who decide what to stock, understand that sometimes I need things with tiny root balls that will adapt more quickly to tough spaces under trees or on dry slopes, and at other times I need the same plants in more mature sizes for immediate fill.

Quality, of course, but second chances mean more

Of course it’s a requirement that a good garden center have quality plants, and if an establishment meets the other criteria here, it’s likely it has them.

It takes time to learn all there is to distinguish a good plant from a bad one, and along the way you will buy a bad plant or two. My evaluation of a garden center includes plant quality but accepts that living things will sometimes fail. So my measure of excellence puts more weight on grace in the face of trouble. If a plant fails and there is a warranty, does the seller honor that with good cheer, intelligent questions to determine the cause and helpful suggestions? Then that’s a good garden center.

Notice that I say “if” there is a warranty. Personally, I don’t believe in guaranteeing living things. If a garden center offers a guarantee, fine, but if they offer a reduced price on purchases without guarantee, I’ll take the discount because in fact I am the only guarantee that plant has. It’s up to me to find a place for it where it will get what those good reference books say it needs to thrive, to plant it properly, then check it regularly to see if it’s doing well, and to diagnose problems before they become terminal. If I return to a grower for advice, employ his or her suggestions and don’t see improvement, it’s my responsibility to follow up with more questions, just as I would with a medical doctor for a physical problem.

At a garden center worth shopping, the staff will work with me to resolve problems. Sometimes we’ll win, sometimes we’ll lose, but there will be no hard feelings either way as long as those on the retail end give it an honest go.

Variety is a big factor in garden center rating. No one business can stock every plant but if it’s good it will carry both the tried and true, such as pines and junipers for foundation planting, and the new and exciting, such as this sculpted Scots pine and Chinese juniper trained as a small tree being readied for shipping at a wholesaler.
Variety is a big factor in garden center rating. No one business can stock every plant but if it’s good it will carry both the tried and true, such as pines and junipers for foundation planting, and the new and exciting, such as this sculpted Scots pine and Chinese juniper trained as a small tree being readied for shipping at a wholesaler.

Sure, you can order by mail. But why bother if everything is available locally? Very rarely do I order by mail, since Michigan’s garden centers are stocked so well. A friend complained to me that he could find the plant he sought at just one mail order firm and it was very pricey. Within half an hour of making some calls, I found it locally for less.
Sure, you can order by mail. But why bother if everything is available locally? Very rarely do I order by mail, since Michigan’s garden centers are stocked so well. A friend complained to me that he could find the plant he sought at just one mail order firm and it was very pricey. Within half an hour of making some calls, I found it locally for less.

Please understand me

That’s my final measure of a good garden center, whether the people who work there understand what it is to garden. Do they know their plants only as they are in the pots or do they know them as mature and even old inhabitants of a landscape or garden?

It’s not necessary that everyone on staff is a gardener, but there should be enough of them, in positions of influence, that everyone on staff recognizes that quality as one to aspire to. When new employees see, hear and feel in every aspect of their work that experience counts, they are more likely to seek it themselves, to respect it in their customers and to learn who on staff they should turn to when they need to tap it. At the finest garden centers, by design or chance, the experts on staff are people who can discuss a plant’s maintenance, honestly admit its faults and recommend companion plants. They can also say “I don’t know” with the assurance that comes from glimpsing the vastness of the gardening world, and “I’ll check on that for you” in a way that sets an example of good service for everyone around them. Those who know plants are special, and in Michigan they are the cream of the crop.

Article by Janet Macunovich and photos by Steven Nikkila, www.gardenatoz.com.

Janet’s Journal: Gardeners and builders, save those trees

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Builders are not tree specialists and may not even know the full effect of construction on a landscape. Unless you explain and enforce concepts such as the fragility and extent of a root zone,work will expand into that zone.
Builders are not tree specialists and may not even know the full effect of construction on a landscape. Unless you explain and enforce concepts such as the fragility and extent of a root zone, work will expand into that zone.

Here are tips to help you preserve your landscape during a remodeling or construction project

People are digging in these days.Not digging into the soil to make a garden, but digging in on their property to improve it by adding on or remodeling their homes. Ironically, this often increases the property value in one way while reducing it in another, unexpected way.

I’m talking about established trees and landscapes, overlooked assets that are often lost during and after construction. Sometimes, the loss is unavoidable. Even if you wanted to preserve a particular tree or group of shrubs during the construction process, it might not be possible. More often, the loss is the result of oversight, ignorance or miscommunication.

The loss can be huge, in tangible and intangible forms. First, there’s resale value to consider. Surveys by realtor groups (involving photos of homes with and without trees and shrubs) asked how much prospective buyers would pay for the various properties. The surveys indicated that landscaping can add 20 percent to the value of a home. Greenery in general, but large trees especially, garnered positive responses.

Then there are living expenses and quality of life. Energy conservation studies have proven that shade trees can significantly reduce heating and cooling costs. Environmental research concludes that established plants can cut noise levels and improve air quality, with attendant reduction in medical costs and stress-related illness for residents. And although numbers may never be able to convey the value of peace of mind, a majority of people agree that it comes in increasing amounts with beautiful surroundings filled with butterflies and birdsong.

Finally, communities lose when landscapes are degraded by construction. Many cities and regional authorities are dedicating public funds to the quest for cleaner water and lower water treatment costs. Such campaigns focus on educating the public about how actively growing, diverse plantings promote water quality by intercepting, holding and biologically filtering rain that would otherwise pick up pollutants as it runs along pavement and hard-packed soil.

It’s in your best interest to hold onto both the direct and indirect returns your landscape provides. Building professionals are not skilled in tree and landscape preservation. If you’re planning to build onto your home or remodel, or you aim to build new and want to keep all or part of the landscape, you must learn how to be an effective advocate for your trees and other greenery.

There are five points in the construction process when you should think and act to preserve your landscape. When you first consider construction, at your first serious meeting with a building contractor, just before construction begins, during the work and after the building project is complete, there are things you should know and do.

When the general public is polled,we learn that an established landscape can increase a home’s value by 20 percent…
When the general public is polled, we learn that an established landscape can increase a home’s value by 20 percent…

…to a gardener, the landscape may count for more than the house!
…to a gardener, the landscape may count for more than the house!

When you first consider construction

Your role as a landscape advocate begins when you first consider adding on, remodeling or building new. Begin by identifying “must save” plants. Then hire an arborist and/or a horticulturist, or train yourself to evaluate the health and replacement cost of those trees as well as the adaptability and moveability of shrubs and smaller plants. Get a written estimate of the replacement value of plants and detailed plans for protection and after care. It’s an invaluable item, both for your consideration as you weigh construction options and costs, and as a means to increase builders’ awareness and respect for the landscape.

You or your arborist/horticulturist consultant should also prepare a map of your property that shows the location and extent of the root zones of plants to be saved. You’ll use this to direct construction traffic and deploy protection for these invisible, surprisingly fragile and irreplaceable elements of your landscape.

Pamper “keeper” plants right from the start. Don’t wait until the plant has been damaged—for some damage is almost inevitable during construction. Fertilize your plants and begin or maintain a good watering program to build their stamina.

If you can’t protect most or all of the root zone, it’s not realistic to have that plant on your “keeper”list.This is especially true of species that are intolerant of root disturbance,such as this 70- year-old beech.The root zone extends to and beyond the tree’s drip line.Less than one-third of that area was protected. The tree died within the year.
If you can’t protect most or all of the root zone, it’s not realistic to have that plant on your “keeper” list. This is especially true of species that are intolerant of root disturbance, such as this 70-year-old beech.The root zone extends to and beyond the tree’s drip line. Less than one-third of that area was protected. The tree died within the year.

Discuss all grade changes before the fact. Excess soil piled in the root zone and against the trunk are almost certain death to a tree.The tree also suffers crushed and broken roots from the equipment which spread that soil.
Discuss all grade changes before the fact. Excess soil piled in the root zone and against the trunk are almost certain death to a tree. The tree also suffers crushed and broken roots from the equipment which spread that soil.

Deciding which trees to protect and placing barriers and cushions are good first steps toward preserving the landscape.Don’t slip up on the followthrough. If you hide your head in the sand during construction your precautions can fail.This oak’s protected root zone was breached and the soil there compacted. When the grade beyond was raised, water couldn’t drain. The tree died in two years.
Deciding which trees to protect and placing barriers and cushions are good first steps toward preserving the landscape. Don’t slip up on the follow-through. If you hide your head in the sand during construction your precautions can fail. This oak’s protected root zone was breached and the soil there compacted. When the grade beyond was raised, water couldn’t drain. The tree died in two years.

At the first planning meeting with your builder or work crew

Identify and stake out the exact placement of new buildings or structures. Determine where the grade will change and how much, whether it will be built up or cut away. Discuss all trenching and excavating ahead of time, in detail. You and your landscape experts need this information to plan specific protective measures and negotiate changes in building plans.

List all work functions that will take place on your property and where each will occur, including material storage, fuel storage, parking areas and places where paint and concrete will be mixed or dumped. Compare this to your keeper plant list and root zone map.

Plan a mutually agreeable vehicle and equipment route into the work area. Aim for a straight route, since every turn of equipment means more churning of soil and increased risk of scrapes and bumps to nearby plants. Allow for a track at least eight feet wide, as anything less represents an unreasonable expectation.

All trenching and excavation should be planned for minimal impact on “keeper” plants.Help your builder understand the effects and explore options. A trench for utility lines detoured around this oak, unfortunately, cutting through at least half of the roots along the outer edge of the circular root zone.
All trenching and excavation should be planned for minimal impact on “keeper”
plants. Help your builder understand the effects and explore options. A trench for utility lines detoured around this oak, unfortunately, cutting through at least half of the roots along the outer edge of the circular root zone.

A less intrusive option is to trench straight toward the tree and then bore under the main roots and trunk.Builders may not think this is necessary or possible since as non-gardeners they imagine the roots to be very deep.Here the main roots are visible at normal depth, within the top 18 inches of soil.
A less intrusive option is to trench straight toward the tree and then bore under the main roots and trunk. Builders may not think this is necessary or possible since as non-gardeners they imagine the roots to be very deep. Here the main roots are visible at normal depth, within the top 18 inches of soil.

When you make a root zone map of the property,you can deny access to the root zone of individual “keeper”plants. Sometimes it’s better to fence off entire areas, as here where root zones are protected behind this construction fence.
When you make a root zone map of the property, you can deny access to the root zone of individual “keeper”plants. Sometimes it’s better to fence off entire areas, as here where root zones are protected behind this construction fence.

Now you may have to modify your “keeper plant” list. Be realistic. You may have to change some plants’ status from “keeper” to “remove,” “move to save,” “keep but cut back,” “tie back,” etc. Then, for every plant that remains on the list, plan ways to protect not only the visible parts but the soil and roots. An eight-inch depth of mulch has been proven to be more effective in protecting the soil from compaction and roots from crushing than any other construction site device, including heavy plywood “paving.” Discuss this with the builder along with tarp coverage beneath material storage areas and where falling debris is expected, and where you will accept the greater cost but lesser damage to plants that comes from drilling beneath root zones rather than trenching through them.

Finally, before any work begins, discuss and list who will be responsible for plant removals and obtaining necessary permits (many communities require tree removal permits). Establish who will execute plant moves, when they will be done and how all parties will know that the involved areas are “all clear.” List, too, who will be in charge of putting up and maintaining protective fencing and padding, creating the cushioned vehicle and equipment route, and explaining all of these features and their importance to workers. Expect to be an active player throughout construction.

When construction is about to begin

Now it’s time to move, elevate or cap sprinklers, prune or tie back at-risk trees and shrubs, prepare the vehicle route and place fences and protective devices.

On the access route, peg down landscape fabric first. Its presence will confirm the original grade when it comes time for clean-up. Have eight inches of mulch dumped on the route, beginning at the entrance with successive truckloads rolling over already-mulched ground.

Place fences and barriers. Keep two things in mind as you do this. One, if there is space, workers will use it. Two, people need room to work. It’s true that work expands to fit the available space, so barriers are necessary, but they must not hamper the work.

Post signs, even if you feel they are redundant or obvious. “Fuel storage,” “dump excess concrete here,” “stay out, loose soil” are some messages you want to communicate clearly.

Expect to pay extra to protect plants and soil. The construction industry is not aware of its full impact on plants, does not go back to see the consequences years later, and has not been asked to consider the cost of effective protection in its estimates. So be prepared to buy or pay extra for tarps to cover paint mixing areas, “bulldog” type porous tarps to protect shrubs from falling debris or paint, and increased labor to carry in rather than truck certain materials across the soil.

During construction

Your most important act during construction is to stay involved. Many gardeners have described how they felt the need to detach themselves, to avoid looking at what was happening in their yard, and afterward go through a process of reclaiming the space. This is understandable but precisely the wrong thing to do.

Get out there, every day, to see what’s happening, to communicate with the workers and to tend to your plants, which cannot detach themselves. Be ready to prune off broken branches as soon as the damage happens, move fences to enlarge or reconfigure protected areas, add mulch or tarps, etc.

Stand up for your plants. You are the expert when it comes to their needs and condition. Do whatever you must to maintain the protection you intended and to continue watering and other essentials during construction.

At this point you should recognize that there is a language barrier between gardeners and builders, and compensate for it. Even simple terms like “soil” have different meanings to both, leading to variable interpretations of acceptable quality and density. A concept such as “root zone” may be incomprehensible to a carpentry crew, or exist in an altered state in their minds so that any conversation that involves the term must be confirmed with diagrams and clarifying questions, just as “load bearing wall” may be Greek to you until it’s drawn out. Although there are individuals fluent in both “gardenerese” and “contractorese,” you should assume until proven wrong that everything you say can and will be misinterpreted.

I’ve been admonished, in preparing this material, to prepare myself for righteous anger from those in construction fields, who may think that in speaking of all a homeowner must do to protect their landscape I am belittling the skills construction workers have and their sense of responsibility. I hope that I’m making it clear that I do respect skilled and responsible construction workers but at the same time I know that my expertise and that of any gardener deserves as much respect. We are expert in our differing disciplines and when we share the same ground, we must communicate carefully. That begins with respect, extends through explanations of technical terms on both sides, and is never hurt by a few shared cold lemonades on a hot day.

After construction ends

Inspect your plants and the soil for damage. Photograph the plants. These images may be invaluable as benchmarks to assess their recovery.

Make your landscape a garden once more. Remove the excess mulch, landscape fabric, protective fencing and tarps. Aerate the soil. Check that sprinklers are working, and make necessary repairs and adjustments. Untie tied-back plants, bring back temporarily relocated plants, and add new plants.

Watch for signs of stress. These signs may not show up right away—in fact, symptoms of stress may not show up for months or a year in larger plants. The bigger the plant, the longer you may have to keep it under watch.

Give stressed plants kid-glove treatment. Watering is the most important thing you can do, but special fertilizing, pruning and patrolling for particular pests that prey on weakened plants of that type may be in order too. Follow the plan that you made for the plant or had made way back in phase one. It all comes together now, when you see your plants resume the growth rates and beauty they possessed before you were possessed by the construction bug.

You can tell when your trees and shrubs recover from construction stress.Monitor and compare the current growth rate to pre-construction or the species’ average growth rate (listed in books such as Manual of Woody Landscape Plants by Michael Dirr).This sugar maple branch grew just three inches in a year, evident in the differing color of new and old wood.The species’average rate is 8 to 12 inches.It’s still recovering and still needs special attention.
You can tell when your trees and shrubs recover from construction stress. Monitor and compare the current growth rate to pre-construction or the species’ average growth rate (listed in books such as Manual of Woody Landscape Plants by Michael Dirr). This sugar maple branch grew just three inches in a year, evident in the differing color of new and old wood. The species’average rate is 8 to 12 inches. It’s still recovering and still needs special attention.

Another way to gauge stress and recovery is leaf size and color. If leaves are smaller than normal or discolored, the plant is stressed.This oak leaf is chlorotic—the plant equivalent of anemia. Chlorosis is as often an indication of root damage as it is mineral deficiency. So pamper this oak with aeration, steady watering and special fertilizer until the leaves tell you it is recovered.
Another way to gauge stress and recovery is leaf size and color. If leaves are smaller than normal or discolored, the plant is stressed.This oak leaf is chlorotic—the plant equivalent of anemia. Chlorosis is as often an indication of root damage as it is mineral deficiency. So pamper this oak with aeration, steady watering and special fertilizer until the leaves tell you it is recovered.

Watching for signs of stress after construction

Symptoms may be immediate or delayed:

  • Wilting or shedding of foliage during or right after construction.
  • Development of early fall color or leaves dropping early that season or the season following construction.
  • Reduced leaf size and shoot growth the next season or later.
  • Twig or branch loss the next season or later. More needles may drop than are produced on an evergreen. The plant may appear thinner,more transparent.
  • General growth, appearance and pest resistance may be poor, and secondary problems may appear.

Helping the plant recover

  • From April through November, water deep and slow throughout the plant’s entire root zone whenever the soil a few inches deep is dry and warm.
  • Check root growth (dig test hole at drip line) and resumption of pre-construction twig growth rate to determine when the plant has fully recovered.
  • For every inch of trunk diameter, expect a one-year lag before regular growth resumes.

Article by Janet Macunovich and photos by Steven Nikkila, www.gardenatoz.com.

Janet’s Journal: The plant whisperer – What do you say, what do you hear?

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What can it hurt to talk to your plants? Maybe it does nothing for the plants, but it makes you a better, more observant, attentive and cheerful gardener

In the 1960s a corn plant (Dracaena) stuck its leaf into a polygraph and started the world talking about plant-speak. Lie detector expert Cleve Backster lectured and gave interviews about the experience although the scientific world dropped the topic after having a good laugh.
In the 1960s a corn plant (Dracaena) stuck its leaf into a polygraph and started the world talking about plant-speak. Lie detector expert Cleve Backster lectured and gave interviews about the experience although the scientific world dropped the topic after having a good laugh.

Luther Burbank, by all measures a genius for more than 800 plant introductions, including the classic Shasta daisy, readily admitted to talking to his plants. He wrote that plants are telepathically capable of understanding speech.
Luther Burbank, by all measures a genius for more than 800 plant introductions, including the classic Shasta daisy, readily admitted to talking to his plants.

You’ve heard of whisperers. Most well-known are horse whisperers, people gifted in working with frightened, neglected, aggressive, hard-to-handle horses with behavioral problems. These healers came out of the woodwork when Robert Redford added his famous smile to the considerable mystique of horse whispering, yet one group is notably quiet. Plant whisperers remain in the shed, so to speak.

Why is there virtually no coverage in the press and no scientific attention to plant whisperers? When so many do it, when there are high-profile champions of the cause such as Prince Charles (‘Of course I speak to plants’), when slightly wacky lie detector expert Cleve Backster hooked his houseplants to a polygraph, and Alfred Hitchcock story collections featured men going mad once they could hear the voices of grass being cut and vegetables plucked? The conspiracy of silence stretches back even to 1848 when Dr. Gustav Theodor Fechner’s theory of emotive greenery, published in Soul-Life of Plants, sent only a short-lived riffle through the scientific community.

My goal is not an appeal for proof that plants hear us and respond. My point in amplifying the subject of plant whispering is to look at what it does for us, the whisperers. It’s irrelevant whether you believe the plants respond or not. What matters is that you see how good this practice is for those who do the talking.

The author whispers assurances to the weeping pine as it’s wheeled to its new home. It’s just part of the job, keeping the plants informed of the whole situation.
The author whispers assurances to the weeping pine as it’s wheeled to its new home. It’s just part of the job, keeping the plants informed of the whole situation.

Nine years later, never forsaken by the gardeners who voiced aloud their promises to help it through recovery, it’s still going strong. If it could speak, would it chide us or thank us for putting it into a place of prominence?
Nine years later, never forsaken by the gardeners who voiced aloud their promises to help it through recovery, it’s still going strong. If it could speak, would it chide us or thank us for putting it into a place of prominence?

Better learning when we hear as well as see

People who study human learning claim that we remember significantly more of what we see and hear than we do of things we heard but didn’t see, or saw without accompanying sound. In that case, we are bound to learn more if we speak to a plant, reinforcing thought with sound.

In addition, researchers have proven that we retain a great deal more information when we move as we learn, matching muscle use to spoken word. Since few can speak to a plant without also stroking a leaf, straightening a stem or gesturing in some way, we are also scribing into our muscles what would otherwise be only a mental and aural memory.

So it makes sense that the gardener who stops to chat is more likely to remember which of his or her charges need water the most, which limbs need staking, or where the bugs hang out. It’s a good bet that person will remember the promises and observations made aloud and then act on that knowledge in ways that improve the garden.

I pay attention when I’m talking

Talking is also a means of focusing attention, and that’s a basic tenet of the whisperers’ craft. Buck Brannaman, famous horse whisperer and consultant on the movie of that name, tells his students to get the horse’s attention first, that if you don’t have that, it doesn’t matter what you do next.

In the case of plants, the benefit doesn’t come from capturing the plant’s attention. It comes when the plant wins your undivided attention.

In talking to a plant, I’m compelled to look for specifics to include in my dialogue. It’s not like the wordless, soothing crooning or repeated generalities like “It’ll be all right” that I might use with a nervous cat in a car. I’m talking to myself as much as to the plant so I’m more likely to be analytical in my plant whisperings. I look for something worthwhile to say, perhaps, “You’re looking greener today” or “How’re those tips, have we finally ousted those pesky mealybugs?” Even if I’m taking a hard line with a plant the conversation is going to focus on particulars, such as, “I warned you that we’d have to cut that branch if you don’t start adding a bit more leaf on the other side!” Because I decide to talk, I look more closely and attend to the details.

An old saying sums it up, “The best fertilizer is the farmer’s footprint.” Attention makes the world greener while lack of attention leads to garden failures. We all know that plants rarely fold up and die overnight, that there are usually early-stage symptoms that an observant person can use to make a diagnosis. It’s also pretty commonly accepted that ministrations in the initial phases of a plant’s decline tend to be more successful than last-ditch efforts applied to the near-dead. Yet ask anyone who works at a garden center about the story given by people who return dead plants, and you’ll hear that it is most often, “I don’t know. It was fine and then it just died.” Such terse individuals are probably not plant whisperers. They didn’t talk and by keeping their mouths closed they failed to open their eyes.

Who can say whether this weeping hemlock survived its ordeal because we chatted it up? From the minute the author tied back its branches for surgery and started to dig, she began talking.
Who can say whether this weeping hemlock survived its ordeal because we chatted it up? From the minute the author tied back its branches for surgery and started to dig, she began talking.

Here it is being trundled to a new spot out of the way of construction workers building a new wing on the house.
Here it is being trundled to a new spot out of the way of construction workers building a new wing on the house.

While alone in its new spot, the author and other gardeners kept the plant company, whispering regularly to it. Certainly the water they brought it and the intercessions they made to keep construction workers from piling things on its roots made a difference.
While alone in its new spot, the author and other gardeners kept the plant company, whispering regularly to it. Certainly the water they brought it and the intercessions they made to keep construction workers from piling things on its roots made a difference.

Most recently, five years settled and joined by other plants, it has become happy enough to have earned the warning, “I know we said that if you’d hang on and make this move we’d never bother you again but if you keep up growing like that we’re going to have to start pruning you!”
Most recently, five years settled and joined by other plants, the hemlock has become happy enough to have earned the warning, “I know we said that if you’d hang on and make this move we’d never bother you again but if you keep growing like that we’re going to have to start pruning you!”

Synergy from involving others in the conversation

We capture the notice of others when we talk to plants. Not just the bemused neighbor or passerby but important others, people who have something to contribute but might not think to share information except that you piped up first.

As an example, take Pat the gardener and Pat’s handy, loving, but horticulturally-clueless spouse. Pat, leaning close over a small shrub and commiserating: “Oh, that’s not good. Here I thought you were all taken care of but that big old brute lilac is blocking the sprinkler from reaching here, isn’t it? I’ll just have to water you by hand until I can figure a way to move that sprinkler. Maybe you’d like a trickle irrigation line, wouldn’t that be good?”

Pat’s spouse, sitting unnoticed on the far side of the lilac on the patio, thinks: “Ah ha. That would be a perfect thing for a birthday present. I’ll have to ask Pat’s buddy Kim what the heck trickle irrigation is.”

It’s not just something that happens in the family. People of different disciplines do meet and take steps forward for the greater good when the thoughts of one are out there where both can examine them. Claus Mattheck was a mechanical engineer when something, perhaps one of those belt-wearing, saw-wielding plant whisperers known as arborists, made him take a look at trees as structures. Now Mattheck’s book “The Body Language of Trees,” is revolutionizing arboriculture by explaining specific signs that tell of impending breakage and fall.

Talk softly and carry a big smile 

Maybe the biggest benefit to the whisperer comes from the quiet, calm nature of whispering. This low level of sound probably applies more naturally and consistently to a plantsperson’s work than to any other whisperers’ job. Animal whisperers embrace non-violent ways, but don’t you suspect that even the best of them has raised his or her voice to a subject, if only to be heard above the crashing of hooves against a stall or baying at an imagined threat? That kind of racket just doesn’t happen with plants. Even when we’re upset with a plant so that we feel it needs rebuke, we don’t stand back, stamp our foot and holler. We practice reason or at least learn to accept events with grace, two strategies that become routine and thus are there as a natural fall-back attitude in stressful non-garden situations.

Are you laughing at yourself or a plant whisperer you know? That’s another benefit of this practice. Who hasn’t pulled up in spring an item they planted in fall, mistaking it for a weed? We recognize the error at sight of the potting mix on the root ball, or when we see that there are three of the supposed weed, regularly spaced in a triangle as weeds never are. Perhaps it’s good for the plant to hear “Oh you poor thing, I’m sorry!” but the grin at your own expense is worth far more.

Article by Janet Macunovich and photos by Steven Nikkila, www.gardenatoz.com.

Janet’s Journal: Springboard into the garden season

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Gardening has never been easier. Power equipment, ergonomically efficient hand tools, landscapes featuring groundcovers and mulch rather than labor-intensive hoed flower beds, inexpensive materials for no-bend raised beds, and lightweight prepackaged potting mixes all ease the strain of the garden season on muscles, bone, timetable and checkbook. It’s great.

But there is a consequence of all this efficiency and mechanization that causes me concern. Those long-reach tools, no-fuss plantings and time-saving schemes put distance and time between the gardener and his garden. Yet spring is a time to embrace the garden!

Early April is the time to get the jump on garden work. Smart moves now put me ahead of trouble for the whole season…
Early April is the time to get the jump on garden work. Smart moves now put me ahead of trouble for the whole season…

…If I wait until May, it’s too late!
…If I wait until May, it’s too late!

Lift perennials whose crowns have been pierced by running root weeds, remove the weed roots and replace the desirable plant. Sometimes the weed is quack grass or Canada thistle, but in this case it’s Carolina lupine (Thermopsis caroliniana), a desirable but rambunctious species, that’s spread underground to undercut this cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis).
Lift perennials whose crowns have been pierced by running root weeds, remove the weed roots and replace the desirable plant. Sometimes the weed is quack grass or Canada thistle, but in this case it’s Carolina lupine (Thermopsis caroliniana), a desirable but rambunctious species, that’s spread underground to undercut this cardinal flower (Lobelia cardinalis).

Don’t we get enough separation from our gardens from November to April? Shouldn’t we be kissing the ground, hugging our shrubs and stroking the silky new bulb foliage once the snow melts? That’s what I do.

Not only does it make me feel better to reconnect, but it keeps me ahead of trouble and on the easy side of the street for the whole year.

Here’s my spring start-up routine.

When the bulb foliage is up several inches and perennials’ basal rosettes have begun to show new green, I know the soil in that area has drained and warmed enough to accept my ministrations. In my own beds and most others I’m involved with, I expect to be out there on April 1, although I do work in a few beds that are too low, poorly drained or so shaded and sloped away from the sun that plant growth is retarded and I wait until later in April.

It helps at this time of year to summon one of my alter egos to coax, prod, push or fire me up and send me out the door, because an April morning can seem cold and unappealing. Even though I’ve learned that every hour I spend in early April saves me triple time later in the year, and I know that it will be less than an hour before I’ve warmed up enough to peel off my first layer of insulation, the first step out of the house can take work.

Here I cut back woody Artemisia absinthium to budded stubs…and it presents a bushy new face three weeks later.
Here I cut back woody wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) to budded stubs…and it presents a bushy new face three weeks later.

My first and most important job is to visit the plants and see how they’re doing. So I crouch, pruners in hand to clip away last year’s stems from perennials and damaged bits from shrubs, and give each member of my garden the once-over.

I’m not doing anything other than clipping yet, but I’m noting things like the presence of weeds in or near the crown, animal damage, weak or rotted portions, overcrowded clumps or over-eager colonies, and puzzling unknowns. After 30-some years watching my plants wake up, I pretty much know my team. Each species has its own character and unique weaknesses. Some always jump up ready to rock, some winter restlessly and need untangling from the sheets, and a few need to be hustled quickly to the vanity for a makeover before polite company arrives. Occasionally one needs doctoring or inoculation because I see early signs of that plant’s unique recurring problems.

There are always a few new guys every year who give me pause. Getting to know each one is like learning the ways of a new friend, one day and one encounter at a time. In spring, I scribble my observations on a mental clipboard.

I cut to just above a bud on woody perennials such as culinary sage, lavender, Russian sage and shrubs that I cut back hard, including butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii) and bluebeard (Caryopteris x clandonensis).
I cut to just above a bud on woody perennials such as culinary sage, lavender, Russian sage and shrubs that I cut back hard, including butterfly bush (Buddleia davidii) and bluebeard (Caryopteris x clandonensis).

I clip herbaceous perennials back to the ground, leaving only the brand new leaves or flower buds.
I clip herbaceous perennials back to the ground, leaving only the brand new leaves or flower buds.

As I cut, I toss plant debris over my shoulder onto the lawn or a tarp. Every 10 or 15 minutes I stand up, pocket the pruners and stretch out with a rake to clean up my clippings. It’s unwise in early spring to spend too long in any one position or motion.

If the bed needs fertilizer, I broadcast a slow-release, organic product. I do this now so that the granules of fertilizer will be mixed into the top few inches of soil as I do my next steps—weeding and dividing.

I weed the bed beginning where most weeds begin—on the edge. Most of the plants we call weeds get into a bed as creeping roots or from seed dropped from the plants just outside. If I keep the edge free of weeds, the middle of the bed can almost fend for itself. After one good weeding in April I generally have very little weeding to do in May and often none in June, July and August.

I cut along the edge with a spade, separating runners from their source and loosening the soil. Then I lift out seedlings and creeping infiltrators, chasing every bit of running root. If there is a root barrier such as edging surrounding the bed, I loosen and lift seedling weeds all along the perimeter and check to be sure that defensive barrier is working. Sometimes I find that running root plants are coming in over the top of the edging or ducking beneath. If that’s the case I plan a change in tactics—a wider no man’s land to thwart above-ground creepers or a deeper edging against the subterranean invaders.

When I have secured the borders, I look to any weeds in the center. Weeds there consist mostly of desirable plants that have run amok. Running root perennials like bee balm, obedient plant, herbaceous artemisias and Japanese anemones have that tendency to spread beyond their appointed places. I sort out such messes by chasing the aggressive plants’ roots outward from their crowns. Sometimes it’s necessary to lift neighboring perennials all around these aggressive species, remove the foreign roots from their crowns and then replace them. Do this now and the oppressed plants will have time to reestablish roots before they stretch upward for the year. No sign of the disruption will remain.

I edge with a spade, inserting it…
I edge with a spade, inserting it…

…and leaning back on the handle of the spade, which forces the blade up and loosens that soil along the bed edge. Removing weeds from the edge is simple in that loose soil.
…and leaning back on the handle of the spade, which forces the blade up and loosens that soil along the bed edge. Removing weeds from the edge is simple in that loose soil.

Left: I prefer mulch that is dark and fine in texture, such as cocoa hulls on the left edge of this bed. Right: But I will use anything that is free of weeds and can cover the ground, from shredded bark…to the fall leaves shown.
Left: I prefer mulch that is dark and fine in texture, such as cocoa hulls on the left edge of this bed.
Right: But I will use anything that is free of weeds and can cover the ground, from shredded bark…to the fall leaves shown.

Now or at my next visit in April I divide declining perennials and tend to those who seemed to need help with pests. Dividing is a matter of lifting all of an existing plant, removing the oldest parts—usually the center—and replanting only about one-quarter of the whole. I put back only pieces that are vigorous, outer-edge divisions, as those probably carry the least spores and eggs of pest diseases and insects that may have contributed to the original plant’s decline.

Every plant I lift for dividing represents a loss of organic matter for the bed. So for every bushel of peony, daylily, daisy or anything else I remove, I spread a bushel full of compost on that space and work it into the soil. If I don’t, the area will settle after replanting. Plants in such depressions may suffer from poor air circulation or puddling water.

I replace every bit of organic matter in a perennial bed when I divide. I lifted a wheelbarrow full of daylilies (in the background) in a fall dividing session and so added a wheelbarrow of compost to that area before replanting divisions.
I replace every bit of organic matter in a perennial bed when I divide. I lifted a wheelbarrow full of daylilies (in the background) in a fall dividing session and so added a wheelbarrow of compost to that area before replanting divisions.

My final chore in spring is to top up the mulch in the bed. Where the existing blanket of mulch is less than two inches thick, I add new, being careful to leave a clear collar around the crowns of plants so moisture isn’t trapped against stems.

I’ve been told that the thorough weeding I prescribe for early April is impractical, that it’s far too laborious to cut, loosen and clean the entire edge. Yet that’s the way it’s done in botanical gardens, because that’s what works best. It’s not such a chore as it sounds. This 500 square foot bed has 100 linear feet of edge. It took me just about an hour to cut and weed the outer 18 inches, all the way around.
I’ve been told that the thorough weeding I prescribe for early April is impractical, that it’s far too laborious to cut, loosen and clean the entire edge. Yet that’s the way it’s done in botanical gardens, because that’s what works best. It’s not such a chore as it sounds. This 500 square foot bed has 100 linear feet of edge. It took me just about an hour to cut and weed the outer 18 inches, all the way around.

Pre-emergent weed killers are unnecessary if you mulch. Pre-emergent products are often counter-productive in a perennial bed, getting mixed too deep into the soil in the normal course of weeding and dividing so that they do not prevent weeds at the surface, but build up to begin affecting the deeper roots of desirable plants.

There! Now I can sit back and enjoy the season because there will be very little hard work to do until fall!

Article by Janet Macunovich and photos by Steven Nikkila, www.gardenatoz.com.

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