THE PRICE IS RIGHT
There’s no such thing as too many when self-sowers are artfully edited or as elegantly employed as these chives (Allium schoenoprasum) lining an herb garden path in early summer.
Volunteers have been encouraged and used to their best advantage in this whimsical gravel garden.
Self-sown annuals, biennials, and perennials won’t come back like every other hardy plant in your garden. They’re much more likely to surprise you by returning as volunteers in new places and even occasionally in different colors. Volunteers are the plants that make the garden dramatically different, and yet comfortingly familiar, from one year to the next. They’ll keep you from working too hard or taking the garden too seriously, but at the same time, they make involvement obligatory. Because—and this is the fun part—to cut a diamond out of nature’s rough, self-sowers have to be edited as ruthlessly as any freshman first draft.
When I started my first garden in my early twenties I was easily overwhelmed. I still remember the summer one nursery-grown borage (Borago officinalis) sowed a carpet of seedlings, as it will in almost any climate. I assumed that meant it was a noxious weed and evicted all of it with a couple swipes of the hoe. Weeks later, when it would have been blooming, I pined for its blue shooting stars in my salads and icy beverages. I needn’t have been so hasty. Sure, some plants self-sow like crazy, but they are only weeds if they grow where we don’t want them. The more time I spent in my own garden with excellent plants, and in other gardens working alongside fearless mentors, the more I learned to appreciate volunteers and understand their role.
Borage (Borago officinalis) flowers are edible—so pretty frozen in ice cubes—and self-sow like mad.
An artistic self-sown combination of butterfly weed (Asclepias tuberosa), Mexican feather grass (Stipa tenuissima), and betony (Stachys officinalis ‘Hummelo’).
White corydalis (Corydalis ochroleuca) growing out of a rock wall at Avant Gardens in Dartmouth, Massachusetts.
We should rely on self-sowers not just because they’re free, but because they provide free labor. They plant themselves. No need to walk around the garden to find the best place for a plant. No need to dig a hole. They usually take hold where they’ll thrive on benign neglect and grow into sturdy, robust plants without the coddling required of transplants. Besides being cheapest landscape crew you’ll ever hire, volunteers are also the most creative. They find the places our trowels could never penetrate—like pavement cracks, stone wall pockets, and rocky crannies—and they form sublime combinations that even the trained artist in me never considers. I wish I could claim credit for planting bright orange butterfly weed against a clump of purple betony, but my design assistant, the wind, thought of that.
One-hundred-year-old trees and decades-old shrubs aren’t the only plants that give a garden gravitas. Corydalis poked into nooks and growing out of crevices helps a new garden feel established—and does so much more quickly than even the fastest growing trees. Allow violets to take hold of peripheral gaps, neglected corners, tree root notches, the shady base of rock outcrops, and watch purple lovegrass (Eragrostis spectabilis) tuck itself into driveway cracks and ledges. Every plant that grows where a weed otherwise might, helps knit a young garden to its bones.
Self-sowers will also remind you that the garden is not a flat stage set or picture-perfect painting. It’s a three-dimensional shape shifter and we rarely view any part of it exclusively from front and center. Some of us watch it from a second-story bathtub; others catch it at an oblique angle when we get into the car. I sometimes gaze at mine from ground level just for kicks. Shifts in vantage and perception give us all sorts of peeks into the garden, over and through the plants. Allow a curtain of false Queen Anne’s lace (Ammi majus) to fall in front of an anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum) for a glimpse of twilight blue through the veil. Or watch as flower-of-an-hour (Hibiscus trionum) weaves itself almost invisibly through the garden to decorate other plants with its surprising flowers.
Just because volunteers are free spirits (and some are downright scrappy and streetwise) doesn’t mean they can’t enrich a formal or modern garden with sophisticated simplicity. In fact, formality only takes a few crisp lines. And any garden with repeating textural patterns and diagonals will feel like modern art. Loose grids of blue fescue (Festuca glauca) or Mexican feather grass (Stipa tenuissima) inside knot garden parterre quadrants contrast elegantly with any clipped hedge. Cardoon carvings and teasel towers (Cynara cardunculus and Dipsacus fullonum) may stand in for expensive urns and tuteurs as architectural focal points that direct viewers’ attention like a pointed finger. A garden with actual urns and tuteurs will look elegant no matter what seeds in around them.
For four-season gardens, allow plants with sturdy upright posture like anise hyssop (Agastache foeniculum), sculptural seedpods like honesty (Lunaria annua), and seedheads like dotted mint (Monarda punctata) and sea holly (Eryngium planum) to punctuate every season but spring, which doesn’t need help exclaiming anyway. Let them stand through the winter, at least until the birds have had their fill of seeds or they self-destruct under the weight of the weather. Then think spring with columbine, poppies, and lupine.
A stunning woodland garden spring combo of Canada columbine (Aquilegia canadensis) and Rhododendron ‘Roxanne Hardgrove’.
