Some thoughts about plant vitality
I really wanted to use the term ‘plant hardiness’ at the top of this piece, but was afraid that the topic would be mistaken for ‘cold hardiness.’
I divided and replanted every daylily plant in my garden last fall, beginning in August. Wound up with about three hundred feet of daylily beds around three sides of our yard. Unfortunately, I made a few mistakes, the most egregious of which was that my eyes exceeded my pocketbook. The largest hundred foot bed had plenty of augmentation to the soil, mostly in the form of several cubic yards of Black Kow composted cow manure. But, as work progressed around the west and north sides of the yard, I ran out of funds, and wound up planting perhaps two-thirds of the daylily plants in plan old porous Florida sand. Oh, well, I thought, generous watering can compensate for that. I hope.
This year, my partner and I are redoing the beds yet again, and I’ve made a couple of unfortunate discoveries. For the past five years, we’ve been planting an L-shaped hedge of Ruby Loropetalum around the west and north sides of the yard. They make a gorgeous purple-leafed shrub and have scads of pink flowers in season. The oldest part of the hedge is being maintained at a height of three feet, and looks wonderful. The newer sections will get to that height by next year.
What I did not know, until I began digging daylily plants up was this: Ruby Loropetalum shrubs send out a network of tiny little purple roots as far as four feet away from the base of the shrubs. The daylily beds were a mass of those little purple roots, and any daylily plant too close to the shrub was choked with those roots.
And the competition for food and moisture cost us quite a few plants. Chalk it up to a lesson learned.
We’re in the process of excavating the beds in front of the hedge. We’ll be digging down about nine inches, and out about four feet. Then we’ll line the hole with nursery cloth - to prevent invasion by the roots. After that, Black Kow will be dumped into the hole, and nursery cloth spread over it. Problem solved - we hope.
Now to my main observation, and the focus of this writing: For the most part, the older the cultivar, the better it stood up to these adverse conditions. There were one or two exceptions, or as the saying goes, the exceptions that prove the rule. Some of the cultivars from the eighties actually seemed to be thriving in plain sand.
Which has led me to wonder this: in their rush to provide thousands of color combinations and patterns, have the hybridizers bred the vitality right out of the plants? And, if that’s the case, what can they do about it - if anything.
Your thoughts?
