When a trampling disaster struck the garden
Please, don’t step on the soil.
That’s common advice because walking on soil compacts it. Foot traffic presses particles of soil together, reducing pore space, and those pores are essential to growing healthy plants. They hold water and air but when compacted, the soil becomes dense, robbing the roots of oxygen and water-carrying nutrients.
I avoid compacting soil by using carefully placed stepping stones, except I had to ignore that advice completely last fall. On June 29, 2021, when that huge storm tore across the city, it took about 2.5 metres from my spruce tree and flattened my old barnboard fence down one side of the garden.
Since the fence fell away from the plants, nothing was harmed, but it had to be replaced. That was a problem, as there was no way to avoiding trampling on the flower beds, not only by me, but by my four helpers wrestling with a posthole digger; however, I did wait to do the work until October, after the growing season was over.
With everything chopped down and the remains piled on the compost heap, the trampling began in earnest. With that advice about not stepping on the soil in my head, I feared the worst.
I couldn’t help wondering what it would look like by spring. Would anything survive? When spring arrived this year, I checked the flower bed daily for signs of life, and there were some. My fears were not realized. A few crocuses poked up first, then the daffodil group appeared, although with fewer blooms. Soon enough there was green showing everywhere.
Amazingly, plants were emerging from the still-squished soil, although I wasn’t sure how they would look after the roots had been crushed and mangled. I knew some would recover, like the tough old yarrow that’s been there forever. Droughts, extreme cold, and summer floods had never stopped it.
I feared for the more delicate plants. A pair of kniphofia, the redhot poker plant, were thoroughly extinguished, and an eight-year-old eryngium vanished forever. My notes recorded it as being just in front of the yarrow. Not a sign of it.
There could be others unaccounted for, and yet most have returned. Some look better than ever, like the false baptisia that’s determined to become a shrub. As for the echinacea, they’ve surged back. Not only survived, but there are extra plants that sprouted from seed.
And therein lies one positive benefit I can attribute to stepping on the soil.
Plants drop their seeds in fall, some not until well into winter, and just as in the biblical parable, the ones that do reach the ground don’t always germinate successfully. Yet with all the trampling of the flower bed the seeds had been firmly pressed into the soil. This meant good seed-to-soil contact that aided germination and in spring they sprouted in profusion. The verbena bonariensis, beloved by bees and butterflies, nigella, and especially the red poppies, put on the best show ever.