Guest post by Ailsa Francis
Nobody likes to stake plants, right? I have always felt that if a plant needed staking it was somehow an indication of my own ineptitude. Maybe if I had grown it properly, it would be strong and self-supporting. But truth is, some plants just need a helping hand and I’m just not willing to give it.
I have grown several different varieties of peony and have never been happy with the traditional ways in which we are meant to stake them. Using peony rings is just an exercise in frustration. I have used short-legged ones that are useless. I have used tall ones where, after struggling to get the sliding legs equidistant from each other, I simply could not jam them into the ground without having them mangle the plant and then bend. By the time I’m finished, the whole thing looks like a dog’s breakfast. And for what? The hoops simply support the foliage (which don’t need it anyway) and the heavy blooms look great when they’re in bud, with heroic stems holding them aloft. But once they’ve opened, the full weight of their ridiculously ostentatious petals means one rain and they’ve collapsed. I’d rather see them falling onto the ground than be strung up like criminals. It’s enough to make you give away all your double peonies and trade them in for the singles. That’s why I handed over a couple of hundred dollars to buy a sturdy Itoh hybrid yellow peony that holds its blooms up without any help from me.
Take this attempt at corralling peonies (top)) for example. This is at a local well-known garden where I once worked—in fact, a tourist destination where the gardeners are trained. I can promise you that I’m not responsible for this fiasco, but if a professional can’t make staking look good, then what are the hopes for everyone else? The only thing worse than this contraption is the fact that this photo was taken in September, a full three months after blooming had finished! Free the peony!
Wait, there’s more. And sadly, at the same garden (below).
Some plants should never see staking. There are several reasons for this opinion, none of them having to do with my own dislike or laziness. Some plants are meant to move with the breeze, to provide a natural effect in the garden, a counterpoint to more erect and formal plants. Like Siberian iris, for example. Siberian iris isn’t meant to look like a cartoon character with crazy hair. But sadly, this is exactly what’s happened here. The plants that surround it also need to see the sun, but this is not a good enough reason to commit this staking travesty.
When your Siberian iris is this big, you need to reassess your maintenance strategy. It needs dividing, not staking. When I see gardeners doing this, the first thing I want to do is rip the twine off—or confiscate the plant.
Of course, when you’re a world-renowned public garden and you have flopping problems, what do you do? On a visit to Longwood Gardens a few years ago, I was surprised to see this impressive staking job (above) on tall ornamental grasses.
The first thing I thought when I saw these Panicum was the headache they would have caused if I was the one to ensure they looked good for the thousands of people who would walk by in a day. I was pretty impressed. But I also think that this staking effort is more prophylactic than anything else; they don’t look to me like they’re in imminent danger of flopping over. Still, I can’t help but think that these grasses were probably replaced the following year with another type that is more self-supporting, like Calamagrostis or Miscanthus. Any grasses that can flop after the first driving rain storm should be replaced with sturdier contenders.
I can’t leave you without showing another planting from Longwood, one where there is ample flopping, Lord knows. It gives me nightmares to imagine these gracefully lilting seed heads of papyrus staked!
Yesterday’s gardening, staking. No need for us to be oldfashioned. Belongs with lawn edging….Feeding promotes the need, which gives us another reason to abandon fertiliser and manure. Let’s have our plants living in comfort.
Yes, Anne, I would agree with you about over-fertilizing leading to long, lanky plants that flop and hence the horribly ugly supports that we feel we need to give them. I was trained years ago to pile on mushroom compost, no matter the plant, but now understand it can do more harm than good, especially in the way it attracts insects and can promote disease. But I have to say I still love a good edge.
You stake tomatoes or you harvest less of them. Your choice.
(or you buy them?)
I would definitely still stake tomatoes Gr, as I don’t want mine rotting on the ground. That is, if I grew tomatoes ;c)
Thank you for freeing me of my “too lazy to stake” guilt. I must admit I do stake Baptisia with those sliding leg stakes you mention above above and scream in frustration when I hit a rock, a common occurrence here in SE PA. Maybe I’ll let them go natural this year and chop them all down after blooming.
You made me laugh Cindy as I do the same thing with a humungous Baptisia that is in a client’s garden! I managed to get the thing in and have left it there through the winter – it only has one leg and an adjustable hoop, but does the job. No more fussing required. I think I purchased it through Lee Valley.
I cage my tomatoes.
I trellis (or something) my pole beans and peas.
I create structures for my dragonfruit and passionfruit vine.
But I absolutely refuse to stake my trees, berry bushes, or ornamentals. The tree trunks grown stronger swaying naturally in the wind (even the 60+ MPH we recently had after I just planted a few new fruit trees). The berry bushes adapt. The ornamentals grow stronger or get pruned. I just don’t want to put up stakes everywhere – I feel like it weakens the plant and messes with the feel of the garden.
And sometimes, on my evening walks around the neighborhood with the doggos, I have been known to snip the rubber ties that are gouging into trees that have long since outgrown the need for the ties or the stakes they are attached to. I could cite several examples in my neighborhood in which there are trees “supported” by stakes that are a fraction of the tree’s girth.
I have the same obsession about freeing poor staked tree trunks too Laura! There is nothing worse than someone doing that when they are newly planted and then forgetting about them. I’ve often seen wires embedded in trunks as a result, well past the point of no return. I know that I’ve seen some smart gardeners use brush from their pruned shrubs or from the woods, poking them in the ground around floppy perennials and they make an almost invisible support. I think this can work, if you don’t mind the lead up to the foliage covering them, as it can look like a garden of dead branches sticking out of the ground before that!
So funny and so true! Thank you.
Thanks Julie! :c)
I thought I read in a Christopher Lloyd book that if your plants need staking you don’t have enough plants. Crammed together, they support each other.
Yes hb, that’s surely something Christopher Lloyd would have said! LOVE his gardens at Great Dixter. So full and colourful! Creating that kind of tapestry is indeed masterful and planting closely can do that for sure. I do recall visiting and having the experience of some of the taller plants swaying and leaning into the paths, which wasn’t a bad thing in my mind at all.
A useful thought if you do want to grow tall wobbly things (not tomatoes..) – if you cut them down as they come up to flower they usually will grow smaller, sturdy, and flower later.
Yes, Anne, I’ve done that with asters, but I recall the flowering was indeed quite late — so much so that I feared it would snow first!
You can cut back just an outer ring of the leggy flowers, the outer ring will bloom later, but also help support the taller flowers that haven’t been trimmed back. If you want to get really fancy, cut back an outer ring, and then in two weeks cut back a second ring, letting the interior ring stay untrimmed. You’ll have support plus staggered bloom times X 3!
Ingenius Debra! Thank you for the tip!