This week, we're still up at the West Border in my USDA zone 7 garden; concentrating on the left end. We're moving to the right of the area covered in last week's article, into the area dominated by the dogwood (Cornus florida).
Since a tree's roots can extend over twice as far as the diameter of the canopy, the plants in this area are competing with tree roots from the boxelder (Acer negundo) and the bird cherry (Prunus spp.) as well as those of the dogwood and the large trees behind this border. The ground is a web of roots (as is most ground in my garden).
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A Different View
If you remember the photograph of this part of the border from Part 11 of this series, you will remember the bench and realize we're looking along the edge of the border. The bird cherry is the trunk seen behind the bench, and you can see the azaleas we talked about last week, just coming into bloom.
There's one more azalea, forming a line directly behind the bench. It is 'Nancy of Robin Hill', one of the Robin Hill cultivars, bred for cold tolerance.
This one has a pale pink flower, as you can see - quite nice, although I haven't seen many of them in the past several years. The deer seem to like this azalea and have eaten the buds every winter. I had a few blooms this year, since I'd surrounded it with fencing last year, but they had gotten to it before I got the fencing up. Fencing is going up earlier this year! This cultivar has remained fairly low, as it was supposed to do. I do nip out errant vertical branches now and again to keep it that way.
Behind the azalea, between the Japanese maple (Acer palmatum 'Bloodgood') and the dogwood is my colony of Ostrich Ferns (Matteuccia struthiopteris pensylvanica). I use the term 'colony' rather loosely. At any one time, there are probably four or five plants. They seem to migrate a bit. I'd originally planted them on the other side of the maple tree whose trunk you can see at the top left of the photo. Now, they are almost all on this side of it. This is a majestic fern, native to central and northern North America, Europe, Japan and China and is rated hardy to USDA zone 2. It prefers damp, acid, loamy soil, where it can reach five feet (1.52 m) in height. Mine never do. In a wet year, they might get close to three feet (1m) and in dry years, like this one, they are barely two feet (0.60 m) tall and die back by the end of August. I've just started planting my new "damp" garden and intend to move a couple of these ferns to it to see how well they respond to really soggy clay, since they are supposed to be suitable for marshy areas. I'll let you know.
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