Sunday, May 6, 2012

Sad plant, happy plant


Ah, my favorite theme: right plant, wrong place. Perhaps it is my favorite garden theme, because I do it so often: that is, I put a great plant in the wrong spot. Sometimes this is clearly my fault- I am running out of yard for certain plant types, but buy them anyway, and simply hope I can make it work. But other times, this error seems "thrust upon me," that is, the plant worked well where it was first placed, but conditions have changed: the neighbors trees (or mine) are larger and cast more shade, the weeds have invaded, etc. Above are photos of two plantings of the same plant, a lovely bearded iris.  In the first case, the trees overgrew and shaded the plant too much.  It produced few blossoms on spindly plants and tipped over pretty easily (though bearded iris are often guilty of this).  In the second, the plants are in full sun, are as happy as can be and have produced a huge number of blossoms.  So, I guess one corollary to the theme above is to move plants that are not working in their spot to a better place!
Happy gardening!

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