TAKE COVER
Carpets of ground Cover plants look beautiful and help suppress those weeds too
Last week, I wrote about the no-dig method of gardening which aims to keep soil disturbance and disruption to a minimum to maintain soil structure.
Going hand in hand with this method is the use of good ground cover plants. Through vigorous growth and leaf cover they will suppress weeds by elbowing them out and depriving them of the light they need to flourish. This in turn will mean you need to do a lot less forking out of weeds.
Once a solid carpet of these plants has been established, it can mean sections of the garden practically look after themselves, which is good for those who seek low maintenance gardening!
Ground cover carpets are also a good solution for tricky to maintain areas such as slopes.
It’s worth taking time to choose what you’re going to plant so that the picture you create will be aesthetically pleasing to you as well.
Evergreen choices are great as you will have all year round cover and no bare soil showing. However, be cautious about plants that promise to cover very quickly – they can be a bit of a nightmare to keep under control.
Much as I love Vinca, for example, with its delightful violet flowers, because it spreads by throwing out long runners, it can be unruly. I prefer to go for clumping type plants that gradually increase so you are always in charge of how far it will spread. Here are my favourites. Pachyphragma macrophylla is my new love. It started flowering a couple of weeks ago – heads of pristine white cardamine-like flowers that light up shady spots. It’s evergreen and clumps thickly, so no weed would stand a chance amongst this bunch.
I’ve also got a very soft spot for Geranium palmatum which I let self-seed wherever it likes. I love its large sparkling fern-like green foliage which covers bare ground, and all those delightful pink flowers through the summer. Pachysandra terminalis is a tough evergreen – a low-rise “shrubette”. Otherwise known as Japanese spurge, it has handsome glossy green toothed leaves and white flowers in summer. Useful for partial or fully shaded areas, it will form a mat of green, so long as the soil doesn’t dry out. Bergenia cordifolia is an excellent ground cover for dry shady places – one of the most difficult types of soils to plant. Known as elephant’s ears for the shape of its foliage, its thick green leaves are also tough like an elephant’s hide. It’s evergreen with leaves developing a bronze tint in winter, very hardy, and produces small pink, ruby red or white flowers.
Geranium cantabrigiense is a hardy semievergreen that creeps along at a steady but manageable pace.
In summer it has lots of pink flowers but it never screams “look at me”, it just gently and reliably does a valuable job.
Omphalodes nitida is one of the best spring to summer flowering evergreen perennials. It’s an easy care plant and does well in partial shade. Starting this month, there will be lots of small bright blue flowers – quite similar to forget-me-nots – above fresh spring green leaves. ‘Starry Eyes’ is also a popular cultivar, each blue flower having a white edge. Brunnera ‘Jack Frost’ also produces pretty sprays of blue flowers but it is grown for the beautiful silver marble heart-shaped foliage as well. I’ve some bare soil that I planted with wildflower seeds last year.
I haven’t decided what to do with it next, but for this year I’m going to sow it with nasturtium seeds in a couple of weeks.
By summer this patch should be a sea of round green leaves and masses of yellow, orange and red flowers – and a valuable by-product is that it’s something for bumblebees to enjoy as well.