Becoming a gardener
As a landscape professional I am eager to learn more about gardening. Which is why I read several Canadian and UK garden magazines. You know what I’m talking about, those beautifully crafted magazines featuring sprawling gardens full of stunning perennials; plus shrubs and trees. As soon as I see them on the shelf at Chapter’s Indigo I buy them, even though the prices are steep.
When you look at the pictures, there aren’t any empty spots visible in the beds, it’s all perennials and they look awesome. It makes you want to hop on a plane and find them so you can enjoy them.
I also find reading about English gardeners fascinating; seeing their profiles and pictures motivates me to get better at gardening. Great gardeners know their plants! That’s where I want to be.
But I always wondered: how do they handle the masses of perennials populating their gardens once the plants are spent. Remember, perennials are easy to care for: just cut them back once a year. But what do you do when you have massive perennial beds that require cutback? Who does the work? Temporary foreign workers?
‘Chop & drop’ technique
I should have known there would be a twisted answer to my question. It’s not my first time. When I read the late Christopher Lloyd’s work, I too expected precise answers from a famous English gardener. But no, he stunned me by saying that he prunes when he gets to it! Awesome. For example, there’s no exact date for cutting back Rudbeckias. You cut them back when you get to it.
Now let’s get back to sprawling perennial beds. As it turns out, gardeners in England save time by using a ‘chop & drop’ technique. They snip off spent flowers and immediately drop them into the bed.
They sell this by telling you it’s good for the soil and, it must be, as the flower parts decompose. But the key idea is saving time.
‘Chop & drop’ extends to the full perennial plant: they cut it back and leave it in the bed. The full plant is left on the ground; no green waste piles to take away, time saved! I see this locally in municipal garden beds because city budgets are tight. Let the perennials wither away and take care of them in spring when new temporary full time workers come in to work.
In the meantime, the soil is protected and birds can help themselves to seeds.
Ready to try?
I work in landscape maintenance, mostly on multi-family complexes where ‘mess’ isn’t tolerated. Every leaf is blown away and picked up, perennials are cutback as soon as they are spent, and I struggle to keep landscapers away from ornamental grasses so they can wow us until spring.
If you have lots of perennials in your home garden, give ‘chop & drop’ a go. Cutback flowers or the whole perennial and leave it. See what it looks like in spring.
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