Ground Covers

I think we’ve just entered that specific time of year we all love to read about – the annual “guys-search for less work in the garden and less-mowing question time”. In answer to those burning questions about ground covers, which ones work and how they can replace lawns, here are the practical details.

Ground covers work really well in garden settings where you can control weeds. Because contrary to established wishful thinking, weeds do invade ground covers and the only way to remove them is to hand-weed. So if you’re thinking of pulling out the lawn and installing some funky ground cover because it’s less work, let me assure you that you’ll be exchanging an hour of mowing for an hour of hand weeding each week. And unlike the lawn, if you let it get away from you and get really bad, you can’t just whack it to the ground and let it regrow. You’ll have to go in and really do the weeding. Keeping grass and weeds out of ground cover beds can be a lot of work. Ground covers are, in my opinion, a gardening answer to what would look good in masses, not the answer to what will replace grass and be less work.

Climbing Hydrangea as Ground Cover

Don’t ground covers stop weeds? Well, yes and no. Once they’re well-established and growing nicely, they shade the soil. This shade will stop most weed seeds from germinating. Notice the qualification of the word, “most weed seeds”? Garden reality is that there is always maintenance to be done because there are always seeds being introduced via the wind, animals and birds. No matter how thick your ground cover, there are always some plants that will try to take over that area. That’s how Mother Nature works in plant succession; taller plants invade shorter ones, and taller plants invade those until you have tall forests shading the ground where you started with creeping thyme. Give a plant a toehold and it will take root, propagate itself and before you know it, you have a problem of weeds and other “stuff” where you least want it. Before you ask, I think weeding in ground covers is a major pain because no matter how careful you are, it always seems you pull out or disturb as many ground cover plants as you do weeds.

The number two question about ground covers is the hopeful one of what will grow under a (insert one- pine, cedar, big blue spruce tree)? The problem here is that grass won’t because it wants a lot of sun. The space under a dense evergreen is just too dry and shady to support much great growth of darn near anything. So plants struggle on the edges of evergreen plants but underneath them, not much will grow. I suggest a thick layer of attractive mulch and don’t cut up the lower branches of the trees but allow them to spread the way Mother Nature intended them to. If you water heavily and grow on the edges of the tree shade, you can grow a garden but you’ll need more light and water than this kind of tree is willingly going to give.

Another favourite this time of year is what can I do with that slope? It’s too hard to mow and sometimes too dangerous. This is a tough one. The deal with slopes is that they require something that will hold the soil from eroding. But you want them to look good at the same time, you want neat, orderly and good looking. Mother Nature wants great root growth and plant variety. There’s a conflict there that sometimes defies solution. So if you just want to hold a shady slope in place then plants such as vinca are wonderful. They’ll grow quite quickly once established and will do a nice job of stabilizing a slope. Weeds will invade and that’s OK if the objective is to stabilize. You could use spreading ornamental grass or vines such as Virginia creeper in sunnier spots to hold the bank. It won’t look cultivated after a season or two, but it will hold the bank. While I’ve written about this before, if you objective in growing is to reduce work and have the bank look good, then my suggestion is you go with shrubs, evergreens, landscape fabric and mulch. Garden it up with larger spreading plants rather than try to ground cover it up with plants that will require high levels of maintenance. Or allow it to grow wild and let nature take care of its own. There are no middle grounds here for this kind of location.

This probably sounds as if I’m death on wheels on ground covers. Not so. I just want folks to use them appropriately and understand what they do. I think there’s a ton of marketing information that’s given out in bad faith about how these plants really work, just like there are implied promises that all perennials live for a very long time. The reality is that all plants have a role in the garden, you simply have to understand their strengths and weaknesses. If you want a broad swath of plants and if you’re prepared to prepare the ground properly and maintain them both while they are establishing and afterwards, a ground cover bed can be a stunning bit of landscaping. There are few things nicer in a cool, shady garden area than a bed of hosta as ground covers or the shiny-leaved Pachysandra ‘Green Sheen’. Sunny areas and huge swathes of daylilies or shrub combinations can be absolutely stunning on a large scale or patterned thyme varieties on a much smaller scale.

Just understand what it is you need to accomplish and what Mother Nature and the plants have in mind.

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