I’ve experimented with new plants, well, new to me, and I find some are also a bit too much. Snow in summer (Cerastium tomentosum) makes me ridiculously happy when it’s in bloom. Then that delight is overshadowed with frustration as it spreads and spreads. If I had a tough hillside, where I didn’t need to worry about this non-native plant escaping, perhaps I would feel elation as it crawled about at will. However, in our side gravel garden it begs to be ripped out. On the plus side, if you want to work out some aggression or frustration, taking a heavy editing hand to this plant may make you feel better. And, as it is an overachiever, enough will survive and carry on, keeping the garden looking nice.

I am waiting with bated breath to see how generous our Penstemon digitalis is in the back garden. In our front garden we have Penstemon ‘Husker Red’ which is quite the re-seeder. Too much for my liking. But again, we have great soil and no mulch, so any plant that wants to reseed, can and will. Will the native Penstemon follow suit? Spring will tell.

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There may be a time, when the human hand needs to take the reins and refocus the more natural gardens. This is the case for our office garden. I let things do as they pleased last year as a bit of an experiment. What I learned is that with our wonderfully rich soil, everything likes to grow and grow well. Some native plants set roots in our garden and looked fine for a month or so but were not always in keeping with what we want the garden to be long term. For example, iron weed volunteered well, but often in areas that felt crowded, and they were not in keeping with the neighboring plants. There’s nothing subtle about this plant and that doesn’t always work well in a garden plan. A lot of judicious pruning kept many iron weed volunteers in a better relationship with neighboring plants, and they still bloomed to the pollinators’ delight, but do I want to have to worry about Chelsea chopping iron weed throughout the garden? I think not.

Visitors who are already enamored with planting for nature and are more relaxed than formal with their garden’s design, rejoice in our lush, intermingled garden that dances to its own rhythm. But those that are still getting used to not having boxwoods clipped into unnatural shapes find it’s a little too much to take in, to digest, and to appreciate. So, a little re-work is in order.

This spring I’ll do some heavy editing and then plant substantial areas with the same plant. I want to bring the garden back to a more legible state for new gardeners.

If we are to entice those who have never planted with nature, the garden needs to be more approachable. It needs to be more of an example of what a garden planted for nature can look like in the home landscapes. Legibility is key. Inevitably, when giving a garden talk, a comment is made that the public gardens of famed designers are spectacular, but don’t translate to the home garden. Envisioning the gardens of the High Line in the front yard is a bit of a stretch for many. Famous public gardens are much like a couture fashion show: amazing to behold, but not representative of what most of us will find in our wardrobe.

I believe the goal of our gardens at the shop and the public spaces we adopt should be to deviate enough from expected landscape norms to entice but still be approachable enough to inspire homeowners to rethink their own landscape and gardens.

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Chase away the winter blues with our winter garden lecture series.

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“In a hot, cement, heavily trafficked area, you can now see a slice of beauty. This garden illustrates how even small spaces can be an oasis for nature,” shares Peter Wimberg.

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Penstemon Digitalis

What started as plugs last fall was a sea of tubular flowers, swaying in the breeze this spring. The white blooms against the early green flush of the spring garden were striking. The bees delighted in the flowers. The seed heads are interesting and will lend winter interest to the garden. I’m not sure how readily it reseeds, so we’ll deadhead some to be on the safe side.

Dill

Could this be the best $4 spent? Perhaps. A host plant for swallowtail butterflies, this plant has been a lovely contributor to the pollinator garden. It does re-seed, which is nice, but can be overwhelming for new gardeners or those with loose soil because the better your soil, the easier it is for plants to re-seed. Fortunately, the young plants are easy to spy as soon as they emerge, and with our loose garden soil, editing unwanted plants is a simple task. Ours are incredibly tall, almost to a ridiculous degree. It’s common for dill to reach four feet. Our stand has taken that as challenge, often surpassing the six-foot mark. The plants in our gardens are volunteers – the offsprings from the original plants installed three years ago. I don’t need all the plants to go to seed, and some of the volunteers are in areas of the garden where a six-foot-tall plant would look quite odd. Therefore, we deadhead some and Chelsea Chop others to create a more aesthetically pleasing garden. Care is taken to allow several to flower and go to seed to ensure a new crop next spring.  

Native Pachysandra

What a treat this plant has been. What started as the tiniest of plugs last year, in an area that we can’t amend to the degree I would like due to tree roots; these native plants have excelled. It’s a calm plant, not one to stop you in your tracks, but its foliage is worth noting and the tiny white flowers are charming. It would look divine snuggling in amongst the Pennsylvania and Appalachian Sedge. And for the record, our native sedges are thriving in our shade garden. Evergreen, easy to tidy up should you choose to do so in the spring, these native sedges are easy to grow, offer interesting flowers and seeds, and are ideal for those considering a matrix shade garden planting style.

Asclepias tuberosa

This plant has been quite curious this spring. I know to be patient with this native as it is very slow to emerge, but what I didn’t expect is to find new plants emerging as late as July first. Going forward, I will always keep their space in the garden reserved, even into summer. I would hate to assume its demise in late June and add a plant in its garden spot when now I know there’s the chance it will begin to emerge in July. Because our gardens are on the lush side, keeping a few spaces open, while we patiently await the Asclepias to emerge will matter not.

Stachys officinalis ‘Hummelo’

I’ve had nothing but success with this plant. Easy to grow, thrives in the sun, attractive to bees, stands through winter, and spreads very politely via stolons, this plant is on the top of my list.  If you deadhead, it will bloom again. If you don’t deadhead, some will still re-bloom. And if you are a hands-off gardener, the stems and seed heads stand to offer winter interest to the garden. You really can’t go wrong with this plant.

Mountain Mint

The Perennial Plant of the Year is recommended with a word of caution. In areas of our landscape that are not blessed with rich, loose soil, it seems to remain rather tight and tidy. But, in areas where we amend the soil, it can take over with reckless abandon.  We edit a fair amount of the plant each year to prevent it from steamrolling neighboring plants. What does this mean to you, the home gardener? If you have been working your beds, your soil is likely conducive to plant expansion. I would not plant along a fence line – your neighbor may not relish this aggressive intruder.  If you do have the ability to keep this in check, or the room to let it roam, the bees will be forever in your debt. This is by far one of the most popular pollinator plants in our garden.

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Photo: image: Rain Water Run Off, 2021

The post The not so dead, dead hedge. first appeared on Wimberg Landscaping.

I recently spoke to a head volunteer at the Piet Oudolf Detroit garden, and of course our conversation found its way to getting our hands in the gardens once again. While I had a clear, sunny day, my Detroit friend was gazing at garden beds blanketed in snow. She shared that this was not a bad thing. It was the cold, after all, that would allow them to carry out their late winter- early spring garden tasks.

As the Detroit garden features a wonderful selection of bulbs, they must cut back the garden, otherwise the early spring blooms would be lost amongst the still-standing grasses and spent perennials. The garden is cut back, with material made into small pieces to rest gracefully on the garden’s surface. Hollow and pithy stems can be left somewhat standing or taken to a different area of the garden. When this happens, the stems are not chopped, but left in their entirety so that insects can make use of them this coming season.

The clean-up is timed with the temperature of the garden’s soil. When it’s still frozen, walking about the garden will not harm the soil or creatures residing within, such as ground nesting bees.

The objective in any garden task is to do no harm.

In our area, the weather is such that the ground is likely not frozen. As I write this, last night’s snow may have created a lovely winter view from our windows, but the soil is soft, even squishy in parts. We, unlike our northern gardening friends in Detroit, should not be in the gardens just yet. We need to wait for another freeze of the soil, or until the soil dries and warms up a bit before we start our spring tidy up.

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You may have heard people bad-mouthing honeysuckle and wondered to yourself why anyone would get worked up by a flowering shrub. On the one hand, honeysuckle is a low maintenance, reliable plant that produces sweetly-scented flowers that many people adore. In the fall, it produces large quantities of red berries enjoyed by our local birds and wildlife, and it is even semi-evergreen in mild winters. It makes a decent privacy screen along fence lines, the deer don’t really hurt it, and it tends to show up in our yards for free. What’s not to love?

Well, quite a lot, actually. Amur honeysuckle (Lonicera maackii) is the species most commonly seen in our area. It is native to Asia and was brought to Cincinnati intentionally in an effort to control the erosion on our steep hills. It was planted for a couple decades before anyone really understood two key things about it: 1) It isn’t very good at erosion control because most of its roots stay near the surface, and 2) It is HIGHLY invasive in this climate. Like, more invasive than anything anyone had ever seen.

All those red berries that are devoured by birds? Well, they are digested and then seeded (with fertilizer) all over the tristate by those same birds. It is so successful here that this one species has fundamentally and majorly changed the forests in our region, full stop. This is not an exaggeration.

Why? How can one species do that? A few ways. First, it’s really good at shading out everything else, including tree seedlings and anything on the ground layer, like native perennials. That’s important because the forest that will be here in one or two hundred years needs to start now as seedlings, and they have a really hard time doing that under honeysuckle. It’s also known that honeysuckle roots produce compounds that slow the growth of everything else around it, which gives it an edge to become the dominant species. And finally, it’s a real space hog. With wide-spreading, arching branches, it quickly fills the understory with nothing but itself, and there’s not much room left for our native shrubs to carve out a living. It is not an overstatement to say that if honeysuckle is allowed to remain in a woodland, species will be pushed out. Local extinctions can occur, and are occurring.

I spend a lot of time hiking and studying the native plants in the area, and beyond. At first it all looked the same to me, but over time I realized our forested areas in Cincinnati are fundamentally different and less diverse than what I was seeing in almost every other region I travelled to. And the more I looked and paid attention, it became painfully obvious that honeysuckle is the cause. Our local ecology is diminished by it, and now that I can see it, I want to do something about it.

I’m proud that at Wimberg we promote honeysuckle removal and have even done quite a bit of volunteer work to clear honeysuckle from Ault Park, in particular. Peter Wimberg himself has donated hundreds (or perhaps thousands?) of hours to personally cut honeysuckle from those woods, because he understands its impact and wants to protect a unique and valuable habitat. That says something to me.

It is possible to imagine a future without honeysuckle in our local natural and protected spaces, but it will require an enormous investment of time and effort, as well as ongoing maintenance to stay on top of the new seedlings the birds bring in. And where are those seeds coming from? Quite likely from our yards and back fence lines. To cut down on seed dispersal, we need this to be common knowledge–everyone needs to understand why it’s important to remove honeysuckle from our properties to prevent it from spreading back into our protected wild spaces.

Often people are reluctant to remove it if it’s a privacy barrier, but there are good replacement options and it is worth looking into them. If you want to remove honeysuckle from your property, let us help you come up with a plan to make that happen. And if you have a wooded area on your property, it is almost certainly full of honeysuckle. You will be amazed at what kinds of biodiversity can return to a woodland after the honeysuckle is gone. Beyond that, it will be a much more open and inviting space that you can actually explore, if you want, or simply enjoy from a distance, with the knowledge that you’re doing what you can for our local ecosystem.

Now is the ideal time of year to remove honeysuckle, and we’d be happy to get you on our schedule before the busy spring season begins.

Sarah Geiger-Behm

The post What’s the Big Deal with Honeysuckle? first appeared on Wimberg Landscaping.

What motivated you to study for the LEED certification?

I’m interested in how we can use plants and open spaces around our homes and buildings to function as better quality habitat. I think we can make choices that work better for both people and the environment, and the LEED certification program is leading the way to transform how we can do that.

As a garden designer focusing on naturalistic planting, what elements of the course did you find particularly beneficial?

In LEED there is an emphasis on using less water and chemicals, both indoors and outdoors. For landscapes, there are ways to drastically cut down the need for irrigation and chemicals, especially when compared to traditional landscapes. There are choices you can make that help deal with wider problems like stormwater management, the urban heat island effect, habitat loss and drought stress. These might seem like huge intractable problems, but it would be a mistake to think that you can’t do anything about them. In fact, these are problems that can be mitigated on almost any property with a thoughtful approach.

How do you see LEED certification impacting garden design, not just for Wimberg, but for the industry as a whole?

I believe we’re going to see a lot more LEED projects in the coming decades, and garden design is going to play a role in that. People will be planting more trees for shade and windbreaks to cut down on their energy bills and to make it more tolerable in the heat of summer. I think more people are going to realize that plants should play a bigger role in the future of our built environment, and not just because it’s cost and energy efficient, but because it makes it more livable for people as well.

Is there a next level of LEED study – certification you wish to pursue?

The next level is to become a LEED AP (Accredited Professional) with a specialty in either Building Design and Construction and/or Homes. There is also a similar program called SITES which is for green spaces with or without a building (like parks), and that would be a good next step to broaden the kinds of projects I could lead.

As you are already very mindful of the environment, plant communities, and gardening in conjunction with nature, did you find that a lot of the course was already familiar to you- the philosophy behind LEED?

I took a green roofs class at UC last year and have been doing a lot of self-study about rainwater management, so a lot of the technical information was not new, but there was a lot to learn about the goals and structure of the certification program and the process of shepherding a LEED project from start to finish. I came away impressed with the goals of the LEED program and excited about the opportunity to use my professional background to be a part of these innovative projects.

How will you, if you do, discuss LEED with future clients?

It will depend on the client, of course. For highly motivated homeowners, there is a LEED certification program for private homes that is available. I’d be happy to talk with any client interested in pursuing that certification. For larger community buildings like schools, apartments buildings or corporate parks, I can talk them through what a LEED certification process might look like if that is their goal. But more broadly, whether a client is interested in certification or not, we can still use the goals and impact categories of LEED to inform our choices for their space.

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It only takes one weather event, one pest, one disease to wreak havoc on our gardens. And why is this? Simple! We tend to plant monocultures. A walk around my neighborhood reveals a depressing number of the same shrubs repeated street after street, block after block. Boxwoods, Taxus, burning bush, and Otto Luykens are the shrub du jour. Although the number of Otto Luykens is quite diminished thanks to the aforementioned winter weather event.  The first question is why? Why the allegiance to just a handful of plants when in our area we have an incredible, some would say overly daunting, list of plants that would be quite at home in our gardens? Second, I wonder why don’t we want anything new to look at? Wouldn’t it be nice to come home to a front landscape that is distinctly and unabashedly unique and a reflection of the owner? One house’s front garden could be adorned with white flowering plants, the next a short matrix meadow, and the third an English cottage garden gracefully spilling over the front walk. If we are all so unique why are our gardens so homogenous?

A resilient landscape begins with plant diversity. The more plants you add to your garden and the more diverse the plant offering, the more resilient is your landscape. For one, an event will only harm a few plants, not the entire lot. Second, the more beneficial insects and birds we invite to the gardens, the more nature will handle the eradication of unwanted pests. In other words, the good bugs eliminate the bad bugs.

If you’re to do anything this year in your garden, consider how to add more plants. Consider how to expand your plant offering to create a garden that is resilient, beautiful, and supports nature. This can be as easy as reclaiming the areas of mulch in the garden beds and giving them over to new plants. It may be adding a second row of shrubs of a few varieties to the privacy planting to introduce flowers, berries, movement, and textures. And it may be as easy, although a bit of muscle will be needed, as removing the invasive groundcover, and adding beneficial plants.

Be overly generous with your planting this year. Give your landscape the armor it needs to defend itself against weather events, pests, and disease with a wide variety of plants.

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