March, 2008
Letting Nature decide: the Right Plant for the Right Place.
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The famous English garden matron, Gertrude Jekyll, was probably the first person to espouse “Right Plant, Right Place.” This is the idea that you should use plants well suited to your particular situation and microclimate. While she was best known for her carefully orchestrated color schemes for grand British manor houses, where long borders of perennial flowers were organized by color and height backed by dark hedges to create a cohesive floral picture, the principle of Right Plant Right Place still applies to our own backyards.
Jekyll often sited borders of hot colored red and yellow flowers on the south facing aspect of garden, while the cooler, north facing border was colored with cool blues and pinks. It is no coincidence that the red borders consisted of plants that thrived in the drier, sunnier aspect such as kniphofia and achillea while the shady side grew campanulas and hydrangea.
Later, the Cottage Garden movement espoused a more relaxed concept. In these lush, free-flowering gardens, plants were chosen to do well in the conditions present, such as hot sun or dry soil but without the formal structure of a long straight border. Plants were encouraged to mingle, flop, spread and find their own ways, to become an ever-changing tapestry of foliage and bloom. In the cottage garden, plants are not tidied away; their seed heads are considered part of display, and the fallen seeds allow the plants to sprout randomly, further finding the right place to grow.
My garden is another example of the value of self-sowers. Each spring I set out annuals that I know are good self-sowers, such as poppies, cerinthe, alyssum, gaillardia and coreopsis. These plants drop their seed into the open spaces in the garden, among the shrubs, along the path edges, in gaps in the rock walls. With the winter rains crops of tiny seedlings appear. In other words, the plants do all the work, finding just the spot that suits them best. The only thing left for me to do is edit through the many possibilities and new combinations created to make sure there are no single species is crowding out less vigorous specimens.
By late March the paths are all lined with orange California poppies, especially in the dry stretches facing the canyon. California Poppies, Eschscholzia californica, are perennials often grown as annuals, with wide cup like blooms that can be gold, red, even pink. Given some summer water, California Poppies can continue the show well into July or August. They thrive in gritty soils, so their seedlings choose the most challenging spots to fill, places that are often too hard packed dry for any other plant to grow. As the blooms fade and the long seedpods appear, resist the urge to pull the plants until some have opened, spilling their seeds.
Among the roses, purple nodding flowers of Cerinthe major pick up the deep mauve tones of the Austin Rose ‘Tess of the D’Urbervilles’. Later, beds in the orchard shine with a haze of clear yellow coreopsis on 3-foot stems waving in the breeze. Some choice rarities also are treated as self-sowers, to find their best place.
Wild penstemons from the Rocky Mountains and Southwest are notoriously short lived in garden settings. Even their biggest fans admit that nursery-grown plants are simply set into the garden to produce seed. The plants love prefect drainage with a cool root run between boulders but love their tops to be baked in the summer sun. I have set in several Cardinal Penstemon, a hummingbird favorite, in various situations, usually near a rock wall, in hopes some fallen seeds will find a suitable home and flourish. Come summer I look forward to multiple three-foot spikes of red trumpet blooms being jealously guarded by jewel-toned male hummingbirds.
But you might ask how do you keep the garden from just being a weedy mess? Well that is where the wisdom of the Right Plant, Right Place comes into play. The garden must be fairly weed free to begin with. Each morning I walk through the garden, coffee in hand and give myself enough time to deal with any weeds that might catch my eye. Then I edit the thick mass of flower seedlings that pop up just like you thin carrots or lettuce in a vegetable row. And as soon a group of flowers has passed it’s prime I send them to the compost pile, but not before a few seeds are shaken loose to make next year’s display. I can always sprinkle a few packets of seeds out to find their way into a crack or crevice.
A few seeds might lodge in a new unexpected place, perhaps at the base of the hedge and thrive there better than anywhere else, showing me that the plants knows better than any gardener the right place to grow, just like Gertrude figured.
Dave Egbert
Dave Egbert hosts the national synidicated garden show, The Coastal Gardener, each week on you local cable or satellite network. In Monterey County, Dave can be seen on KGO ABC7 and KOTR TV11. Dave is a professional horticulturalist living in Big Sur.
