The Weavers

The highlight of the gardening season for master gardener volunteers in west-central Nebraska was our garden tour. This all-day event, complete with potluck, was not to show our gardens to visitors but for us to visit each other’s gardens. Our group members came from several counties encompassing about 180 square miles. We gathered shortly after dawn to form a touring carpool.

On my first tour, we drove to a town 40 miles away and then went out to one member’s ranch. As we turned up her drive, I saw the most amazing flower border. It was as long as a football field and six to eight feet wide. The color scheme was primarily pink and blue with many other complementary flowers worked into the principal framework of perennials, roses and other shrubs. It was immaculately groomed.

The gardener who created this masterpiece occasionally gave programs about how she had designed and constructed it. She taught me to use a color wheel to ensure colors work well before purchasing the plants. She talked about balance, scale and specimen plants as well as how to use odd numbers of plants to create clumps and drifts. Then she would talk about “the weavers,” a subtle design element to make the border less formal and more inviting.

Her weavers were annuals which she started before the growing season and cleverly placed in spaces between her clumps and drifts. One of her favorites was tall ageratum which has fuzzy blue flower clusters on stems 24 to 30 inches tall. In that part of the world, few annual flower seeds will overwinter and pop up in unexpected places to create a look of casual indifference. Weed seeds on the other hand are impervious to cold and drought.

(Photos, from top: A casual drift of cannas; creeping Jenny; Battle of the Groundcovers)

Here in the South, we have some wonderful reseeding weavers. One of my favorite weavers is balsam, the sun-loving cousin of impatiens. If you start with a packet of mixed color seed, the flowers cross-pollinate so one never knows what color the offspring will be nor where the spring-loaded seeds will land. Cleome is another terrific seed-weaver. Birds are good at moving seeds around as well. They’ve planted columbine far from the original garden patch and brought rather substantial drifts of brown-eyed Susan as well.

When it comes to plants that spread by rhizomes, I think Battle of the Groundcovers! Most of the time this leads to a merry mix of plants, but occasionally total domination does occur. When the goal is to have a trouble-free living mulch, I say mission accomplished with very little effort on my part. I planted Snow in Summer under a tree. Wild strawberries were deposited by birds. The strawberries have crowded out weeds as well as the silvery ground cover leaving a durable low-care mat over the whole area. On another occasion, Creeping Jenny crept out of a pot to establish a meandering groundcover. With larger plants such as-cannas, the effect is a very carefree looking drift rather than a dense clump.

A fellow Nebraska gardener really loved biennials because they were such terrific weavers. Unfortunately many of the classics do not thrive in our humid heat. Foxgloves and Canterbury bells fall into this category. Rudbeckia hirta, dame’s rocket and hollyhocks are better bets here. Biennials produce foliage the first season and flower the second. When the flowers go to seed the plant dies and the seed germinates the following spring.

It does take a few years to have flowers and foliage going at the same time, but the effect is well worth the wait.

Master gardener Ann Bartlett often putters around the ornamental beds surrounding her home in shorts or sweats, cultivating a "look of casual indifference."