"Don't be too tidy in the garden" I have heard these words spoken many times before by well known gardeners and horticulturalists. It gives me an excuse to be the gardener that I am. Someone who loves the cottage garden look and can never pull a plant out until it just screams to be gone. Even when a plant no longer looks at its best it may still provide a meal for something.
These are the spent flowers of Verbena bonariensis. They have been blooming for weeks and a few tiny flowers still remain even through the plant has gone to seed.
Those tiny seeds, and they are almost microscopic, are the reason I am leaving the plant a while longer. Every evening we enjoy the antics of the American goldfinches as they swing and do their acrobatic tricks on the stems of the plants. Many of the long stems are bent double and nearly touching the ground but the finches are so light and agile that they manage to stay balanced on the stem as they pick off the seeds.
Easier to manage are the seeds on the blanket flowers, Gaillardia pulchella, which are more than happy to grow anywhere they can find a foothold.
Not looking their best after days of 100° but the finches are not interested in looks. They are interested in the ripe seed heads. Many of them are just picked clean. Fortunately for me they are somewhat untidy and leave plenty off seeds scattered around which will serve for next years crop of flowers.
That common mullein wouldn't win any prizes.
The soft fuzzy leaves that always looked so perfect earlier in the year are crispy brown at the bottom. Every evening the stalk is nothing but a brown stick. But every morning a few new flowers open and there is always a bee having its breakfast. Seeing those flower buds on the left makes me realize that it will be quite a few days before I can pull the plant out.
Those same solitary bees are also busy on the purple skullcap, Scutellaria wrightii and the snapdragon vine, Maurandella antirrhiniflora.
The first time I saw this vine was in Pam Penick's old garden. It was climbing up the pole of a beautiful Dovecote. It was quite large flowered which might have been due to better sil conditions or being a cultivar. Either way my native one is a small flowered scrambling, rather unattractive vine which has scrambled up to almost take over the Carolina jessamine. But the bees are on there every evening so I feel reluctant to remove it.
Lizards scurry around in the leaf litter and the Carolina wren is often rooting around in there too. Clearly here are some tasty morsels hiding in there. There will be plenty of time in late fall for doing a big tidy.
How about you. Are you a tidy gardener.
For my standards your garden is squeaky clean. Here nothing is removed if it's not killing other plants or it's completely dead. The only 3 plants I remove as soon as I spot them are couch grass, ragweed and creeping thistle. The rest are welcome to grow wherever they want.
ReplyDeleteMy small corner lot in town has very little lawn and is entirely visible from the street. Though I'm continually puttering around and tidying things up, the results are never what I would call tidy!
ReplyDeleteNo one can call me a tidy gardener. I like a
ReplyDeletewell loved garden dull of everything.
Years ago, after reviewing a post on your self-seeders, I recall commenting that I saw little evidence of self-seeding in my garden. At that time, I probably was an excessively (obsessively) tidy gardener but things changed as my garden matured and I'm a lot less tidy than I once was. I admit that I still feel some compulsion to deadhead spent flowers but I do less of that than I used to and, when I cut spent flowers, I often let the seedheads remain on the ground.
ReplyDeleteNo, I am not tidy in the least especially when I want things to self sow. I just removed about a ton--okay I'm exaggerating--of crabgrass from the bed facing the street because it's nearly time for the pink muhly to bloom. I don't have a ton of self sowers in those beds so I think they are okay with new mulch. Love seeing all of your critters. I am so not tidy. In fact, I'm lazy when it's hot.~~Dee
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