Imagine if baking bread was a skill any person living independently in their own house needed to have at least a passing familiarity with, so there were endless books, blogs and websites about how to bake bread, but none of them seemed to contain the most basic facts about how bread actually works.
You would go online and find questions like “Help, I put my bread in the oven, and it GOT BIGGER!” and instead of saying anything about bread naturally rises when you put yeast in it, the results would be advertising some kind of $970 device that punches the bread while it’s baking so it doesn’t rise.
Even the most reliable, factually grounded sources available would have only the barest scraps of information on the particularities of ingredients, such as how different types of flour differ and produce different results, or how yeast affects the flavor profile of bread. Rice flour, barley flour, potato flour and amaranth flour would be just as common as wheat flour, but finding sources that didn’t treat them as functionally identical would be near impossible. At the same time, websites and books would list specific brands of flour in bread recipes, often without specifying anything else.
An unreasonable amount of people would be hellbent on doing something like baking a full-sized loaf of bread in under 3 minutes, and would regularly bake bread to charred cinders at 700 degrees in an attempt to accomplish this, but instead of gently telling people that their goal is not realistic, books claiming to be general resources would be framed entirely around the goal of baking bread as fast as possible, with entire chapters devoted to making the charred bread taste like it isn’t charred.
Anyway, this is what landscaping is like.
Disclaimer: I am about to drag the entire field of landscaping like Hector’s corpse through the mud at Troy. If this is not the kind of thing you’re into, read no further.
So, the entire United States (where I live) is covered in these:
Landscaping shrubs give me major uncanny valley ick. They grow so indifferently to hostile surroundings and caretaking alike, totally ignored by insects, that it seems they must never have been quite alive in the first place.
If it’s possible to be cruel to a plant, what we’ve done to landscaping shrubs is cruelty; they’re bred to be planted in packed clay and gravel beside barren concrete and poison-soaked lawn and cling to life for a few years at best before being replaced— all the while forming no relationships with other plants or animals and showing no outward signs of distress.
So the trouble is. Everyone Knows that the way you make a flower bed is
till up a section of ground,
put the plants you want in it, spaced apart according to how big they’re expected to grow,
spread mulch over the empty space between them,
and pull up all the weeds that pop up for eternity.
This doesn’t work. It’s amazing just how much it doesn’t work and just how devoted the entire fucking world is to believing that it does.
Fact is, ecosystems are a ceaseless and absolutely unstoppable flow of change. New plants emerge. Present plants grow and interact with other organisms. Old plants die. Organic material decays and is changed. Erosion and weathering remove and introduce new soil material. CHANGE. This is what it is to be alive, to have life, to live. CHANGE.
Life wants to proliferate, to grow, to take in and use energy, and we live on an alive planet of alive things. Life has adapted to every possible niche, from the deepest mine shafts to the drains of hospital sinks; the harshness of extreme environments is nothing but “I double dog dare you.”
Extreme environments have life forms that specialize in them. They’re sometimes called extremophiles. A heavily disturbed and denuded environment, like a bare, tilled-up flower bed, is extreme for most plants; plants are a community-oriented lot that essentially collectively terraform their own environments.
Direct, unfiltered exposure to sunlight, rain, and wind is absolutely brutal for many organisms that don’t live in a desert or other similar biome. Plants take damage from the very radiation they feed upon. Raindrops striking the bare soil, without leaves or decaying plant matter to cushion them, pack the surface soil layer into a hard crust. Wind blowing against plant leaves makes them lose water faster (succulents have a workaround though). Soil without a thick mat of roots and fungi penetrating it washes or blows away at the slightest disturbance. Water in direct sunlight evaporates quickly. And bare rock, asphalt, or concrete in sun quickly becomes unsurvivably hot.
These conditions are features, not bugs, of desert biomes, but they are also temporarily created by disturbance in any biome. So there’s a special category of short-lived plants adapted specifically for disturbance. They’re called pioneer species or disaster species, but their other name is more familiar: weeds.
The typical landscaping bed, with big spaces in between the intentionally planted plants waiting for them to grow bigger, is exactly the habitat weeds are adapted for.
Weeds produce a bajillion tiny seeds that make their way into every crumb of soil everywhere, and weed seeds don’t sprout immediately when they are buried in soil—they wait. Weed seeds go dormant, like sleeper agents waiting for activation, sometimes for decades, until they detect a disruption in their surroundings that tells them their environment has been disturbed. Then they sprout.
Keeping weeds out of a flower bed that looks like this is so much labor that no one can do it. And pulling up or killing the weeds is disturbing the soil and activating more weeds. It’s like a task you would be assigned in Hell.
And everyone KNOWS no one can do it, so landscapers lay down landscape fabric or just straight plastic under the mulch so everything in the soil is trapped when it tries to emerge. The trouble with this is that soil eventually forms or is brought in on top of it, and new weeds grow in THAT, or the weeds just sprout right through not giving a singular shit, as weeds are wont to do.
And landscape fabric, like plastic, NEVER DECOMPOSES. Either way you’re just putting plastic in your soil.
Even worse, these ill conceived weed barriers might eventually kill your plants. Roots need water, they also need to exchange oxygen with the air. Enough mulch and plastic to stop weeds, will also likely suffocate your plants to death, on top of stopping water and nutrients from reaching down into the soil where roots can absorb them.
Once your plants are dead, you have to dig through plastic to plant new ones, and probably put down new plastic. With most suburban homes this cycle has repeated god knows how many times and you can’t break ground without digging up more scraps of non-biodegradable trash.
Another alternative is to use straight-up rocks instead of mulch, just pile rocks around your plants. This doesn’t actually stop weeds, but it does mean every time you try to plant something, you get to spend hours picking rocks out of the soil one by one.
Or you can use poison. Yay!
I get so angry about this, because the average American thinks gardening is this kind of torture labyrinth where you just pull crabgrass out of a pile of splinters forever, and any advice they receive will consist of instructions on how to kill their plants slowly.
It’s at the point where the mulch with a few small plants in it IS the aesthetic ideal, where the black mulch is a visual backdrop to set off the plants, because NO ONE EVER SEES THESE GARDENS REACH MATURITY because THEY NEVER LAST THAT LONG. At some point the idea was that the flower bed would eventually “fill out,” but now “dyed mulch with plants scattered in it” is just what a garden bed is expected to look like.
Landscaping websites typically list the lifespan of small trees or shrubs as around 10 years, which is…incredibly sad. Not every plant will live to its maximum lifespan, but many common species can live to 50-70 years.
And what this leads to, is landscapers expecting plants to only last a few years, so they plant trees 2 FEET FROM A BUILDING where they CANNOT SURVIVE LONG TERM. They plant lil baby ornamental shrubs where they cannot grow AT ALL without obstructing a path or a window. But it’s what people expect to see, they expect to see tiny baby shrubs no more than knee high.
No one knows what a bush is anymore. “What are some bushes that are about a foot tall” I don’t know, go to the Arctic fucking tundra and tell me!!! But the actual answer is: any of them, if you kill them often enough.
Many places with “nice landscaping” are literally just digging up their plants and replacing them every few months. That’s what my college campus did.
And here’s the thing that REALLY grinds my gears, okay? Not everybody wants or values Soulless Corporate Boxwood Hedge type gardens, but there is NO INFORMATION on any other way to do things.
The assumption that gardening is a planting your desired plants a certain distance apart in a single event and after that, no change except the plants getting bigger, is so fundamental, you can’t even find a method of gardening that incorporates basic ecological succession. Which is going to happen whether you like it or not.
Weeds are specially adapted for heavily disturbed and destroyed environments, but that doesn’t mean that every disaster species is a “bad” plant that is ugly or harmful.
So here’s what we’d want to do: Group species roughly by their lifecycle (longer lived vs. shorter lived, annual vs. perennial) and the plasticity of their growth form (relatively fixed growth forms vs. colony forming, creeping, stoloniferous or rhizomatous plants, vines). Plant seeds in the wild don’t fall to the ground perfectly spaced apart. The amount of room there is in total is what’s important. Plants adapt their shape relative to the plants around them.
Plants are three-dimensional, meaning they take up the space they need by a mix of vertical AND horizontal growth, and they’re not solid, impermeable masses that exclude other objects, they have spaces between their stems and leaves.
Plants grow overlapping and mixed together with each other. This is actually good for all of them because it cushions them against getting knocked flat by storms. Some wild species can’t even hold themselves up planted alone without other plants surrounding them.
You’d plan out fixed locations for the relatively long-lived plants with relatively non-adaptable shapes. Then you’d put in the plants that can shift their growth forms a little more, plants that form colonies or that grow in the direction they favor etc. Then you’d overload the rest of the space with annual plants, low creeping plants, vines, etc—plants that can essentially move around wherever they like.
Gardeners keep assuming that plants don’t move but they do. Any colony-forming plant or plant with rhizomes, vines, runners, etc. can move to where it wants to be by growing that direction and making new stems and roots there. Annuals likewise will produce a bajillion seeds that end up everywhere and the seeds in the best place will grow up and be successful.
You need a mix of plants that grow tall, plants with a more creeping habit, plants that are more ethereal and delicate and mix in with more robust plants, etc.
The dense, compact, extremely fixed and predictable form of selectively bred garden plants is actually way worse for excluding unwanted weeds. A mix of three or four plants planted in the same space, growing opportunistically to take advantage of gaps between their companions’ leaves, will do a way better job of filling space.
Also, everyone thinks a vine is only good for climbing a trellis or something. Bullshit. A vine is just a plant that does whatever the hell it wants. An herbaceous vine will be perfectly happy climbing your other plants or creeping along the ground, filling in spaces the other plants missed.
You should expect your garden to change over time! That’s the biggest thing I wish people knew. You’re not going to get the “end result” within a year. There is no end result. Shorter-lived plants take over the role of dominating the place while the longer lived ones are still growing up. Every plant eventually dies and another plant grows. Change is eternal, so embrace it!
Think of it like this, either you pick out the adaptable short-lived disaster species, or Nature picks them for you. There’s gonna be weeds. Weeds are as unstoppable as time. So, might as well pick native, ecologically beneficial weeds you like.
A healthy selection of ferocious native weeds will critically weaken the invasive little shits. The long-lived perennials will take longer to grow to maximum size and flourishing with heavy competition, but later-successional species are used to that; they spend the time networking, biding their time and building a super deep root system that will prepare them for explosive and vigorous growth when they’re ready.
Eventually, the “weedier” plants will get outcompeted and begin diminishing…which is when it starts looking like a great time for a new garden!!!!
All of this 100%.
Most of my beds are weedy little shits on purpose. My beds get mulched or planted heavily with annuals their first year so perennials can establish and then (mostly) let go to bare ground the second. Weeds happen and the fun weeds get to stay. Several of my prairie bed plants have escaped to my gravel driveway so I’ve got a driveway or butterfly weed and helianthus and yarrow. The plants don’t care where you plant them or if you want them to stay put. They’ll find bare ground.
But also, so so so many perennials can go to seed and spread. Though perennials are sold as “returns every year!”, many are short-lived perennials so only stick around a few years with their offspring from seed replacing them. But they won’t germinate in mulch. Or if you weed them when they’re tiny and boring.
Clarification though that the 10 year thing is not intended to mean “shrubs and trees only live ten years” but is the estimated window of time that that landscape will look the way the landscape designer intended. The shrub may get larger and outgrow the space it was planned for. And yeah, sometimes the implication is “after 10 years you tear it out and redo it” which is silly goofy absurd, but majority of people do not do that obviously.
And the estimated 10 year heights and spreads on plant tags at nurseries are often just guesses. This is mostly true for cultivars, because realistically, a lot of nurseries are selling shrubs/trees varieties that they simply have no way of knowing anything about as they age. If it’s a new cultivar that’s been in a trial garden max two years and then marketed to the public, how could they possibly know its ten year size?
^^^ another many reasons to plant native plants! As suggested, perennials and self-seeders that aren't super sensitive are a great option to crowd out non-native "weeds" and have lower maintenance beds. Even better: use plants that bloom at different times of the year and with varying growing habits. They will fill more niches and you'll get a nice variety and help your local ecosystem throughout the seasons. And a lot of aggressive hardy native plants for your area are gorgeous! For every biome and ecosystem!
For temperate areas, mulching with leaves is affordable, saves insects that lay their eggs on leaves from being tossed in the trash or burned, and adds organic matter to soil to degrade over time. Just avoid certain types of leaves (for example, black walnut leaves have juglone which is a chemical that prevents a lot of other plants from growing).
If you do decide to use herbicides (there are some plants where it is actually necessary - common and glossy buckthorn, invasive knotweed, etc are extremely difficult to control without herbicide, especially if they become established before you realize what they are or before your time on the land) read the directions v v carefully and follow them closely. Data sheets that come with the herbicide will have a list of the types of plants the herbicide will or won't kill, the amount to use, and under what conditions. Proper use of herbicides is essential for the health of you, your pets/loved ones, the environment, and your garden.
