Laid-Back Lounging
Salvia demonstrating an artistic sprawl on a duvet of faded Japanese maple.
There’s a large patch of crocosmia by a pond I work at which lies down like clockwork this month. It fans out flat as a pancake and sprawls - legs open like a Labrador waiting for a tummy tickle from a trusted owner. The people who find this vulgar in a canine probably can’t stand it in a garden plant. They might rightly point out that though tolerating a well-behaved weed might be excused, why make room for a rogue with no table manners? But I like the montbretia – it is doing what many of us would love to do after a long hot summer after all; chilling out and kicking up its heels. For years we have been cajoled into staking and propping up anything in the garden which dares lean a centimetre away from the vertical so that for those who love perennials especially, by mid summer your borders can look as strung up as a bag of oranges. All that tying and staking and suspending mesh from beanpoles is very time consuming. When I worked for the National Trust, we could spend up to an hour just trussing up a single plant. We built fanciful cages of hazel or birch twigs so they blended in more naturally but the poor asters and salvias and lythrums which burst out of the ground with youthful enthusiasm had nowhere to grow exept into this rustic form of solitary confinement.
Crocosmias always tend to splay their legs like a spaniel waiting for as tummy rub.
How free then the montbretia now looks lolling beside the pond with its unfashionable side parting. It is doing what nature intended and if you care to let more of your plants flop outward you might find some interesting plusses of such intentional neglect. There is good reason that in nature there is no viagra; because flopping has evolutionary advantages– the older and outer parts of some plants hang that way to allow them to reproduce. Think of a sprawling strawberry, ornamental bramble, or a rambling rose which will root wherever their tentacles flop. Neglect to stake and prune your shrubs from hebes to philadelphus–, sarcococca, berberis and elderberries and they too will readily make roots where they come into contact with the earth; it’s nature’s way of getting about the forest. A willow breaks off in a storm, and still the fractured limb sends up a successor. It’s an amazing acrobatic survival success story yet how often do we wipe it away with one aseptic sweep of our meddling secateurs.
Many of these shrubs are easy to propagate in other ways but for some, naturally rooted offsets can be a goldmine. I found this out with clematis which if left unsupported will ramble around and root on the floor. Clematis are expensive and now my slovenliness has reaped me pounds
Similarly herbaceous plants which don’t naturally run about and spread will often root readily where the outer growths hit pay dirt. Penstemons and sedums are like this – generously lowering their skirts and having babies around the edges.
Another reason nature lets down her drawbridge is allow a second flush of growth to spring from the center. Traditionally around June we cut back spring flowering perennials like geraniums to encourage a second flush of leaf and sometimes a few more flowers. But if you let such perennials hang out naturally – quite often they will send up fresh new growth all by themselves.
Perhaps the best reason not to get all strung up about – well - stringing up, is that many plants look good sitting on their backsides. I love the way that big, fat blowsy parrot tulips topple forward onto a path. Eventually they right themselves and hold their frilly bowls up in relaxed fashion to the sun. Similarly dahlias can look a mangled wreckage after a storm, but hold back on the tidying up and the new flowers rally together to disguise the mess. Aster frikartii is the same – it’s a preposterously hard animal to contain so why bother? If not planted too near to a path or in the route of an uncompromising lawnmower it is happy to lie back and make music with whoever else happens to be in the bed. So can’t we too be a little more laid back?
