Cutting back
- To: perennials@mallorn.com
- Subject: Cutting back
- From: c*@juno.com (Pamela Palmer)
- Date: Sat, 13 Jun 1998 10:27:10 -0400
Several people have mentioned cutting columbines back to get more bloom.
Can you overdo that?
For the past four years we had a portion of our landscape planted with
wildflowers from the wildflower mulch packages and containers found at
Agway or in catalogs. Started with a 10 x 10 bed and each year added one
or two beds. Every year we left it to seed itself and then in the spring
pulled out dead stalks. The past two years my husband put the cut
Miscanthus and Pennisetum grasses on top of the beds in the spring and
then raked it off when the green stalks started protruding.
We never really got the same flowers twice except for Sweet William and
Hot Pink Catchfly (Silene Armeria) and they were gorgeous. The Rudbeckia
only grew the second season and never reseeded.
Well last fall my husband waited until things were dead and then in early
November he mowed the plots. This made the area look better over the
winter and again it was mild with no snow cover. So this year when he
raked off the grasses we found NOTHING growing except four orange-colored
wallflower or primrose plants. NOTHING.
Was it those plantings weren't true perennials, or the mowing, or the
ground hog ate down to the roots, or the rocky, sandy soil is just not
good enough? The area is about 60 x 60 and surrounded by olive and oak
trees, bayberry, juniper and rugosa rosa hedges. I can't make enough
compost for all of it. I'm supposedly Zone 7, a 1/10 of a mile from Cape
Cod Bay, windy but not salty.
Pam
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