Contemplating thuggish plants.
Recently a few of us, all members of the Hardy Plant Society Monmouthshire Group, got together over a good supper to enjoy each other’s company and to discuss what we think about those plants usually described as thugs.
There were some interesting thoughts. And someone brought a bunch of thugs (well, pieces of) with them, which provided some useful illustration.
There was obviously much complaint about several well known plants, some of which spread by seed and some by vigorous root systems. Some maybe by both…..
A beautiful thug: Convolvulus arvensis, better known as bindweed. My experience of it: here
I’m not sure which were considered worst (though if you’re sharp with a seeder you might cut the dying flowers off quick). There seemed to be agreement that thugs are seductive if you’re just starting, with lots of empty space. And then that one definition of a thug is a plant you can’t subsequently get rid of, whether it’s spread and tangled into everything or staying stubbornly put with very insistent roots.
It was clear too that different locations and garden types can make a critical difference to what is thuggish. Some people had gardened in different parts of the country and struggled with different problems from those of us in Wales. And some people had attempted to grow some thugs without success.
It seems for example that some people can luxuriate in valerian or a whole field of wild orchids (!) and some can have none of these at all. And it may be in the nature of some thugs to be hard to get going?
Luxuriating in valerian.
Water thugs were identified as especially hard to get rid of and dangerous to the countryside. Which led to discussion of the particular category of thugs which damage the local ecology. We are not like the USA, where immigrant plants are frowned on, since the vast majority of all our plants in the UK are immigrants. But some plants are mad invaders, swamping the local flora and causing real trouble. Japanese knotweed is one notorious one. We wondered how familiar the general public are with which plants should never be propagated, given or sold, and absolutely avoided or destroyed where possible.
But I didn’t get my own question about thugs answered.
I started the garden at Veddw mostly growing, from whatever seed I could obtain, plants which were recommended in Graham Stuart Thomas’s ‘Plants for Ground Cover.’
And it’s clear that many of the thugs people hate started life like that – as ground cover.
I think my need to cover two acres of ornamental garden with desirable if thuggish plants led to my developing a particular style or aesthetic, which gives me an unusual love of thugs/ground cover.
I once published a discussion on thinkingardens by Thomas Rainer and Noel Kingsbury termed ‘Mingle or Clump’ It was one of the most popular pieces ever. So perhaps there are more people mingling their plants than I imagine. (Meet Thomas here!)
In the UK I believe people mostly acquire gardens along with the houses they buy, then they modify that existing garden. They buy or are given more plants and have to find places to squeeze the new ones in amongst the old. Thuggish plants get in the way of adding new plants and may even smother them before they can get their feet in the ground. So thugs are much resented.
An inherited garden, in this case wonderfully full of hellebores.
And I think the traditional English herbaceous border, which is a popular model, has plants dotted down the border, perhaps repeated but identifiably singular – clumped – sometimes even with bare soil around them so that a hoe can keep any thuggy weeds at bay. This also tends to go with one of my pet hates – the edged lawn.
A familiar sight, the English border.
This sort of planting may emerge in summer into something like this:
Pleasant but…..
or this (both from a visit last week)
Also at Iford Manor – a little random?
We were extraordinarily lucky to have two fields to play with and no chance of making traditional borders like the above, given the constraints on our plant purchasing and available labour.
As a result, mingling has been inevitable. Vigorous plants are put together to fight it out and the result tends to be plants happily jungled up together. And thuggish tendencies are constrained by the battle for supremacy. Persicaria campanulata, for example, will subdue ground elder.
Persicaria campanulata doing its job. And looking great.
Thuggish Gardens
But I realised that at that supper that a love of thugs has gone further than setting thugs off together to fight it out at Veddw. I’ve exploited the thuggishness to create drama.
Like letting Leymus arenarius have a bed to itself.
This is a huge bed of this beautiful rampant grey grass.
Or filling a whole garden with Heuchera Palace Purple, Cardoons and ferns.
Cardoons = Cynara cardunculus, Heuchera Palace Purple and self sown ferns.
Bordering the lawn with Alchemilla Mollis and blue geraniums
No need to edge the lawn.
Or bordering the orchard with just Campanula lactiflora and Inula Magnifica
Planting several Rosa wichurana along a bank:
Nearly evergreen and fabulous scent when it’s doing this.
Letting geranium procurrens run free.
Christopher Lloyd warned against introducing this into any garden. I plant it in more places every year.
Or making a Wild Garden full of crocosmia and ‘weeds’
Or indulge Japanese anemones: (see also here)
So my question was: how common is this style of gardening? I’d love to hear of other people indulging their thugs for the joy it brings. Do people do this more in America or elsewhere than we generally do in the UK?
For The Gardening Phobic
And also – I think this should be the way we encourage people to garden when they have a plot outside but hate tending it. Allowing thugs to mingle or to have their very own space is liberating and makes for easy gardening.
Yet we teach people to garden in the labour intensive ways we’ve all originally been taught. It’s a bit cruel and I suggest we need to rethink this.
Perhaps the wisest thing anyone said that night over supper was that the real nightmare plants are not really the thugs at all, but rather the precious plants that demand so much care and attention?
PS Too late! I think I need to rewrite the piece – too many people are reporting plants being difficult when my point is that they work brilliantly for us when we let them and plan for them to do that. Doh! Sorry.
Some of my favourite (British) thugs:
with its hybrids Stahl Rose
and
Chamaenerion angustifolium ‘Album’
We American gardeners often fall prey to the “display your mulch” school of gardening, where plants rise in splendid isolation from a bed of dark shredded wood. However, I garden in the South, where the climate favors thuggish plants, and the battle is to keep them from taking over — both the ones I’ve planted, and the ones that have arrived uninvited. But it’s a bit unpredictable — it has taken years for my Japanese anemones to spread properly in the bed where I planted them, and I am struggling, believe it or not, to establish Missouri evening primrose as a ground cover on a small, sunny bank. Strawberry leaf begonia (saxifrage), on the other hand, and hardy begonia, happily spread everywhere, as do my hellebores. I love all three but have to weed them out of certain areas on a regular basis. Wild violets are considered a thug here, but I love them and use them as a groundcover in a couple of flowerbeds.
Do you use any of the ones which do like you in a deliberate way, taking advantage of their characteristic spreadiness? Or simply manage them?
Yes, I’ve used the saxifrage both as a ground over and as an edging between a wall and a new patio whose edges weren’t evenly aligned with the wall, to conceal the edges and soften them. The hardy begonia is planted in a shady area where I want it to spread, but it keeps escaping! The hellebores fill crevices in an old stone wall, skirt some hydrangeas to provide winter interest, and now fill much of a new rain garden.
Sounds good. Have always fancied a rain garden – and lots of hellebores. Must discover about hardy begonias. And I have corrected landscaping mismatches with forgiving foliage – can be a great problem solver.
Love those swathes!
“the real nightmare plants are not really the thugs at all, but rather the precious plants that demand so much care and attention” – I have similar, heretical, thoughts.
Re: thugs and invasives. Sometimes wish I had several lifetimes to watch the ebb and flow of certain species on a longer timeline than a mere 40 or 50 or 70 years on a 4.5 billion year old planet. It is not in nature’s best interest to allow monocultures to thrive, and there are many weapons in the arsenal – disease, pests, natural catastrophe, etc.. to disrupt these cycles. Sometimes those cycles are short enough to be able to witness them (such as the ebb and flow of yellow rattle in meadows), sometimes not (here, Kudzu). And sometimes we seem unwilling to see (or indeed study!) longer cycles being broken before our eyes and our ecosystems rebalancing to accept (and begin to battle) introduced, thuggish species (multiflora rose, Asian marmorated stink bugs, etc…) — even as we fully accept Darwin’s theories on the evolution of species. Important not to suppress discussion on these topics, and continue to cultivate scientific curiosity. -MW
I wish I could live long enough to see how Veddw might pan out over centuries….
Garden phlox, the common light purple color that I once read was considered awful. I like it, goes with everything and glows in the evening. Campanula vulgaris, a great spreader, coarse bright green leaves, easy to pull out, got one plant years ago. Don’t really care for the dirty pink bells, but it’s blooming now. All compete with the free plants I got years ago – Annabelle hydrangea, ditch lilly ( an orange day lilly that can come thru asphalt), Siberian and bearded iris. It’s time to do some thinning this fall. Gotta do it every so often and give the extra plants to some new poor gardener.
I like borders on the beds. Or the mower man might mow stuff down he shouldn’t. I have formal shaped beds edged with old paving bricks and wild amok plantings.
Old bricks (or paving) are a good solution to the edging issue if they are affordable. But our mower man (called Charles) does no harm to the planting – I guess it’s the toughness/robustness of the plants.
I successfully removed what was essentially a thick woven mat of orange (ditch) daylilies from a large area of my garden and gave them to someone who specifically requested a tough maintenance-free plant to combat erosion on a banked slope. She’ll be happy!
Trying to exert our will on nature is often a gigantic waste of time and energy. Especially when we are trying over and over to grow plants that have no business being plunked there in the first place, either because they are non-native, or because they really prefer different conditions. They’re only thuggish because they’re in the wrong spot.
Surely sometimes they are thuggish because they are in the right spot and as happy as Larry? (whoever Larry was).
I think a gardener needs to have more space than the typical suburban garden (1/3 acre for me) to let thugs take over. If you didn’t keep them in check or remove them, that’s all you would end up with.
There are times when just ending up with a good thug (or two) would be just what a person – disinclined to gardening, perhaps – might love?
Amen and Halleluja to everything you said here. That first success is intoxicating. With me it was a common, but profligate mix of Portulaca. 35 years later it is the one summer annual that my non-gardener husband requests by name. We yanks do have to be careful with non-natives, so I embrace flowering native ground cover/thugs like Salvia lyrata (great foliage), Phyla nodiflora, Conoclinium greggii. They are enthusiastic, but not difficult to keep in check if you are willing to let them roam through gaps and seams. I like to plant lilies and other bulbs up through them. My guilty pleasure is Verbena bonariensis ‘Lollipop’ that I let scamper. I’d rather have a thug I appreciate than a weed I dislike. Thugs are just successful plants. Managed well, all is well.
I love a list of possibilities – I will explore your schemes!
Because nothing will grow in certain areas of the garden, I’ve abandoned those areas to thugs, which are Alstroemerias, Salvia Madrensis, John Fannick Phlox, and some other funky bulb that pops up everywhere whose name I can’t remember. In other areas, the native oxalis and violets run wild alongside the Malvaviscus arboreus var. drummondii (Turk’s Cap), and inland sea oats. Pycnanthemum albescens (white leaf mountain mint) also seems to be running amok. Considering we are in the midst of a 6-week drought with triple digit temps. I love the Inland Sea Oats and the Turk’s Cap because I never water them, and they always look good,
Sounds good. I suppose that what I am proposing is less of the abandoning and more indulging. Get a good thug or two and have a plan!??
Yes! There are some dry, windy and somewhat shaded areas of my garden just begging for a few thugs to fill things in. I’m planting lily of the valley and mint!
Charles has a dozen pots of lily of the valley, filched from his mother, waiting to fill a good spot when planting weather (ie not drought or heatwave) returns. I wish you both great success – it’s one of those which seems hard to get going.
Mint – not so hard. What a treat to tread on when it’s hot!
Hairytoe Gardener-are you in Texas? You mentioned many beloved friends.
You need a certain outlook and mindset if you’re going to work with the more thuggish plants. One example is that you can’t be one of these people who wants every single plant in its own space; thugs will mingle and, if you’re open to it, will make incredible combinations as they do so. Also one of the great secrets to gardening is to choose your plants for ‘pace of growth’, not ultimate size, so if your garden is full of plants with a slow pace of growth you’ll be fine, and if your garden is full of plants with a faster pace of growth you’ll be fine, but mixing plants of different paces leads to problems as some plants invade others.
Like so much in gardening it’s something where understanding plants is as important as simply knowing about them.
Wisdom. Some nurseries include rate of growth in their plant descriptions and it’s a useful indicator.
Not many, however, add that a plant may grow to half an acre in size if unfettered. That could set a person dreaming though…..
I learned my lesson about thugs in my small front rose garden–I want everything, so only plants that are polite are allowed. Now I’m underplanting and squeezing more in. But my back garden is much bigger and is a difficult hill/series of terraces so I’m planting lots of native thugs! Things that self-sow like river oats, goldenrods (OK the more polite ones), asters, lots of big grasses, native mints that spread by rhizomes…encouraging the native violets to become a groundcover. I just started but I’m excited to see what happens.
I had SUCH a hard time decided where to plant hundreds of plugs from dozens of species. I’m just gonna let them duke it out next year and then adjust!
Also I started following the links in your post and haven’t stopped going down the rabbit hole. As always. Thank you!
Now that does sound exciting – let us know how it goes?
“Let them duke it out” is my garden philosophy too! Survival of the fittest / lowest maintenance / most drought and cold tolerant. It’s fun to see what wins out over the season.
Right!
And how could I forget the hardy ageratum! Blooms when I don’t have much else blooming, late summer,. Our long dry spell has it looking pretty draggy, but it always bounces back. Another freebie years ago.
Free is even better.
I do also garden this way, somewhat. I appreciate your garden pictures very much; I enjoy how you’ve done it. As someone who has done all the labor alone and very little budget, I also go for a scrambling, wilder, freer design. I have mint as groundcover around part of my patio. I use it and clip it. It’s a total thug but so far it hasn’t out competed the grass or slinked into the lawn. I also have used the many plants marked down I’ve found (here we call them clearance plants) to fill in a .5 acre of space. Daylily especially works and at $3 per potted plant I’ve done whole sections of border with them. I also have a wild corner where mountain mint (native to US), anise hyssop, bee balm, and daisies are duking it out nicely. In another corner of the garden I have a gravel garden tribute to Beth Chatto with plants like parsley, alyssum, dill, big bluestem and geranium “Biokovo” happily scrambling together. I have a 7-year-old child who has kept me busy all summer and these plants and garden areas have taken care of themselves with a small amount of weeding here and there.
This is great – I think what we need are suggestions like these for ways to use difference plants in different parts of the world: design suggestions. I think most people can’t see beyond possibly ‘giving in’ which is not what I meant at all…..Thanks!
So interesting to be reminded of the English gardening style, so full and naturalistic. As pointed out by Old Herbaceous, we Americans do usually defer to the ‘display your mulch’ style of gardening, even in the rainy northwest. Living in a desert state, I think this is partly due to environmental constraints – we’ve learned to appreciate singular plantings and go well out of our way to deliver water to each of them via drip irrigation. I certainly treasure each plant I own with the knowledge that not only will it not creep away or become thuggish (love that word), it will surely die if I do not regularly supply water to it. That being said we do have some thuggish options.. We have an evening primrose, Oenothera Siskiyou, here in Nevada that proliferates in rocky beds despite the dryness and extreme heat. Galium oradatum is another favorite of mine that does very well with a little shade and marshy conditions that can sometimes be found here. Thanks for the enjoyable read, Anne!
You certainly have different challenges. You (and Old Herbaceous) also remind me of the medieval garden trick of growing plants in isolation from one another to display their whole form – a thing we only do in pots really now in the UK. And even then people usually stuff their pots with a variety of plants instead.
I guess finding drought loving plants with beautiful form would be an extra challenge.