Bog Garden












The Garden Bloggers Design Workshop over at http://www.gardeninggonewild.com/?p=1706#more-1706 is on water in the garden this month. That made me think about our bog garden, which is so successful that we’ve been taking it for granted. But, it didn’t start out that way.

We have a difficult spot in a very visible place in the backyard. Here, the slope of the berm meets the slope of the lawn, and they both meet the drainage from a downspout. It was just wet enough that nothing would grow there, not even grass.

One day, I decided that the solution was to make it even wetter and create a bog garden. Dan was working around the other side of the house and I was nearly finished pick-axing through the first inch of clay, when I heard him scream, “What are you doing, you’ll kill yourself!” Music to my ears, this sentence usually means Dan will do the rest of the digging.

After we excavated a shallow, irregular shape, we backfilled it with two different sizes of stone, and topped it off with enough soil to plant something that didn’t require too much depth.

To fill it up my friend, Diane, offered some Ligularia and irises. The caveat was that she had no idea what color the irises were, since her own iris garden had become too shady over the years and just grew leaves. But, even the leaves were lovely. We added some primroses at the very front.

The bog planting looked scrawny, but I thought, “It will grow.” Well, those of you who are already hooked can probably guess the rest of the story. After only three years, the iris rhizomes were the size of Idaho potatoes and their number tripled. At this point, I’ve sorted them by color and have begun interspersing them into other borders.

The Ligularia have spread enough that I can start thinning them out to populate other parts of the garden next year. Growing in a bog allows them to tolerate quite a bit more sun ( 8+ hours) than you would expect and they are covered with flowers every August. The bog needs occasional help from a hose during very dry periods, but this year, I don’t think I’ve had to water more than twice.

Because my bog is wet and not soggy, there has been no problem with the water seeping out onto the lawn and no ruts from the lawn mower. So, if you have a spot where nothing wants to grow, check to see whether it’s too wet for what you’ve been planting --- you might just have the makings of a bog garden.

Popular posts from this blog

Detention Basins: The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Image
In our area, stormwater sewers that serve housing developments and some businesses empty into the dreaded detention (or retention, or infiltration) basin, a visually hideous engineered method of holding large volumes of water until it can safely disperse to groundwater, natural streams, ponds, etc. (top photo). These are generally grass monocultures or rip rap which, if not properly maintained become weedy, overgrown maintenance nightmares. Suffice it to say that anyone who can get away with not maintaining one will continue to not maintain it. Frequently, the town ends up owning and maintaining such basins, meaning that all the taxpayers pay. When grass is used as the only groundcover and pesticides and fertilizers are applied, they can contaminate the runoff. Regular mowing of the basins is difficult because of the steep sides and wet floor. This maintenance adds contaminants to the watercourse, as well. Grass basins also attract undesirable wildlife, such as Canada Geese, which
Keep reading

Please Garden Responsibly. Because What You Spray in Your Garden Doesn’t Stay in Your Garden

Image
American Lady caterpillar on licorice plant. Photo: Courtesy Missouri Botanical Garden Scores of their silky tents covered the licorice plant in the container on my porch. Inside the tents, something was gobbling up the leaves faster than I could pick them off. The plant must have been infested when I bought it. As I reached for my organic insecticide, I thought, “Wait, you don’t know what kind of caterpillars these are!” I recalled an article on pest management by a friend who cautioned: “Sometimes, the best treatment is no treatment at all.” It took the better part of the afternoon for me to identify the miniature mowing machines. In the meantime, half of them had started dropping from their perches and wriggling off into the underbrush. I hoped I had made the right decision. The licorice plant was devastated. But then I noticed that the caterpillars had not eaten the leaves all the way down to the stem. Possibly, secondary buds could sprout and still provide a silvery
Keep reading

Musings on the Relativity of Time and The Arithmetic of Overpopulation

Image
I celebrated my birthday recently. Beyond a certain age, birthdays become a double-edged sword. You’re glad you made it to the next one, but realize that there are far fewer years ahead of you than behind you. The list of absent friends grows ever longer. Colleagues grow grey; everyone else looks like they just graduated from middle school. I used to console myself by calculating that I still had at least 2 5 more years to go, which made the end point seem very far off. But, now that would mean I’d live to an unrealistically old age, a concept supported by neither family history nor actuarial tables. I’m reminded of Einstein’s summary of his Theory of Relativity: "When you are courting a nice girl an hour seems like a second. When you sit on a red-hot cinder a second seems like an hour." I guess I’ve been having too much fun. But that can’t go on forever. My immortality would not be good for the planet. It’s not sustainable. At the same time that medical advances have
Keep reading