Forbidden fruit

A few weeks ago, as noticed at reference 1, I dug over the small bed underneath our young oak tree, with a view to putting some kind of low maintenance ground covering plants there. With the first such arriving a couple of weeks later and noticed at reference 2. In parallel, we have been thinking about what sort of plants we might add to that first. This by way of noticing various plants which are forbidden.

Bluebells and celandines are excluded because while they do spread and they do cover the ground in the spring, they die back after they flower, leaving a bit of a sorry mess for the rest of the year.

This one, which I know as 'mind-your-own-business', escaped from our southern neighbour's drive and grows in the poor strip of garden running down that side of our house. A strip of garden which is not use at all, apart from providing a bit more light and space between our houses. Accoring to the RHS web site: 'mind-your-own-business or baby’s tears, soleirolia soleirolii (syn. helxine soleirolii) is a creeping perennial with tiny rounded leaves', 'this plant is a native of Corsica and Sardinia', regarded as a useful plant by some gardeners and as a pest by others. There must be quite a lot of gardeners in the first category at Wisley as there is quite a lot of the stuff there, particularly among the rocks and water of the rock garden which rises up towards the alpine house. While BH is very much in the second category, although she has given up on extermination and has settled on control. But definitely forbidden in the back garden.

Then there are the humble grasses. I quite favour just letting a bed go and cutting it once a year with a sickle, in early Autumn. The usual result is that grass of one kind or another is dominant, but with plenty of flowering intruders. An approach which has become fashionable in quite a lot of open spaces and gardens of one sort or another, mostly much larger than the average back garden. While as a child I used to grow native grasses - not the expensive exotics you can now buy in garden centres - as specimens, and very handsome some of them were too, but that would not work in the present bed as the ground is too poor, too dry and too shady.

Next up in common ivy, of which there is already quite a lot at the west, the wild end of the back garden, regarded as an invasive weed elsewhere.

And lastly we have 'carex pendula', aka drooping sedge, regularly noticed in these pages; see for example, references 3 and 4. Not what one would usually think of as ground cover, but that it what it does if conditions are suitable. Which they are probably not in the present bed. In any case, BH thinks that we already have far too much of the stuff straying out of the west end.

Perhaps what all these plants have in common is that they are green, do not have florid flowers and are apt to spread where they are not wanted when the conditions are right. So neither decorative to the female eye nor low maintenance, in the sense that while they do not need much maintenance in their intended home, maintenance is needed to keep them from straying.

In any event, the search for suitable ground cover has moved elsewhere.

PS: I am reminded that I once used to favour plants like nettles and mint, but I have moved on from them. While I still have a soft spot for mare's tail, often seen at the side of railway tracks, but apart from not knowing how to get hold of any, we don't have a suitably sunny spot in the garden where they would go. Again from the RHS web site: 'horsetail (equisetum arvense), often called mare’s tail, is an invasive, deep-rooted perennial weed that will spread quickly to form a dense carpet of foliage, crowding out less vigorous plants in beds and borders'.

Reference 1: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/04/a-kind-of-digging.html.

Reference 2: https://psmv4.blogspot.com/2020/05/a-first-plant.html.

Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/search?q=carex.

Reference 4: https://psmv2.blogspot.com/search?q=carex.