Gardens
Plants by. the yard
Ursula Buchan
It is not unknown for people moving into a larger house to buy books by the yard to fill the empty bookshelves. After all, the effect is superficially pleasing, an impres- sion of learning is created and gaps are filled where dust would have settled. However, books that, viewed from a dis- tance, could be a nicely bound set of the works of Turgenev, on closer inspection may turn out to be the collected sermons of a 19th-century provincial clergyman. If the garden has escaped substantially the atten- tions of the developers, the same impulse may be at work in the extensive planting of `groundcover'.
For more than 20 years the use of groundcover plants, even in small gardens, to suppress weeds, conserve moisture and cut down the amount of time to be spent on gardening has been accepted horticultural orthodoxy. The groundcover movement, largely a response to the increasing shor- tage of hired labour after the last war, was led by Margery Fish and Graham Stuart Thomas. Both excellent gardeners, with a wide knowledge and understanding of plants, they were circumspect about what they suggested for the purpose.
Not so the garden centre publicists, for whom the theory has almost acquired the authority of Holy Writ, an end in itself rather than merely an aid to the creation of a beautiful and interesting garden. The result has been that all too many gardens now are low, flat, green deserts of foliage, to which every dead leaf and sweet-paper clings tenaciously, and through which poke the most wicked and ineradicable weeds. The idea of groundcover, a good one if approached thoughtfully, has been embraced so widely, and often with such little understanding, that it is now a posi- tive curse, with badly affected gardens at once dreary to look at and, ironically, arduous to maintain.
Before of cries of 'Unfair' go up, I would readily concede the usefulness and effec- tiveness of groundcover: as help for those who detest gardening; for those with more acres than they can properly manage with- out the ulitmate solution of putting it all down to grass; and for those whose knees crack like rifle shots when they bend down to weed, if they can get down there at all.
It can be a considerable aesthetic asset in any garden, provided that: plants are not included just because they cover the ground quickly and well; the real space invaders are kept out; taller plants which are (in the jargon) 'furnished' to ground level are liberally included so that there is a variety of height and habit; and perennial weeds are successfully eliminated before a single plant goes into the soil.
To cover the ground just for the sake of it with any old rampager that by its nature is easy to propagate, impossible to kill, and therefore very popular with garden cen- tres, is as unimaginative as buying books in bulk just to fill the bookcases. Who would, for example, seriously wish to pay good money to possess Rubus tricolour, an evergreen, creeping, usually fruitless blackberry, or worse still Lonicera pileata, a plant of such tedious aspect as to make all the other colourful honeysuckles hang in shame at being connected to such a drab? These two will, admittedly, grow in shade, like the equally boring Hibernian ivy, but so will Cotoneaster dammeri, which, though not a shrub to set the pulses racing, does at least have the grace to berry well in autumn. Less planted, with flowers large enough to be obvious, is the lime-hating, but otherwise accommodating, Pachysan- dra terminal is.
There are available some very pretty groundcover plants that nevertheless should be resisted, except for wild and desolate places, if only because it goes so thoroughly against the grain to pull up large pieces of plant that you have gone to the trouble of establishing in the first place. The yellow archangel, Lamium galeoli- dolon Nariegatum' is most attractive, but it will burst out of any border. Another deadnettle, 'Beacon Silver', silvery-white
and pink, has lost me friends to whom I have given generous handfuls, and whose gardens have since been overrun by it. I renounced it for the altogether better- behaved 'Chequers'. Anyone who does not treat most bamboos with the gravest suspi- cion is asking for trouble for they are colonisers in the same league as the Pilgrim Fathers. To be on the safe side, avoid any plant described in a nursery catalogue as 'boisterous' or 'of indefinite spread'.
I would hardly object to the wholesale groundcover school of thought, however, were it not for the unrelieved flatness of many of the plants advocated. Some awareness of this disadvantage is shown by those who attempt to mitigate the grouse- moor appearance of their heather beds with an occasional dotted (never grouped) conifer, as often as not the pencil-thin and incongruous juniper 'Skyrocket'. They would be better planting any of the ge- nuinely horizontal and dense junipers, of which the x media varieties are only the best known, that would grow above the surrounding vegetation.
Above all, there are dozens of taller shrubs whose branches reach the ground. Many of them have flowers, fruits and good leaf colour to recommend them, with a neat groundcovering habit as an inciden- tal bonus. Berberis, elaeagnus, hyd- rangeas, rhododendrons and cistus come to mind.
All this planning is to no purpose,
however, if the soil is not completely clean of bad weed at the outset. Fortunately, two applications, one in late spring and the other in late summer, of 'Tumbleweed which kills even the roots of bindweed, nettles and ground elder, is all that Is required, if planting is to be in the autumn.
Groundcover can be valuable to the busy and keen gardener, but those tempted to fill their gardens with plants whose onlY claim to distinction is that they spread thick and fast may well find that, like a library of unreadable and unread books, such plants will not afford the satisfaction of a few well-chosen favourites.
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