Planting Liriope and Mondo

Planting Liriope muscari, Liriope spicata, any of the varieties of those two, or any varieties of Ophiopogon japonicus is the same process. You might ask, OK, but what are these?

The most common form of Liriope muscari is 'Big Blue' Liriope - scientific name Liriope muscari 'Big Blue'. Some people call this "monkey grass". Liriope spicata is similar to muscari until you look close. Spicata has a narrow leaf usually about 1/4 inch wide as opposed to muscari which has a wider leaf that can be 1/2 inch wide. Muscari has purple blooms on a stalk and black seed pods on a stalk. Spicata has white blooms on a stalk and blue seed pods on a stalk.

Ophiopogon japonicus and all the varieties of it are "mondo". Of the simple mondos there is mondo, dwarf mondo, and super dwarf mondo. Then there are the variegated forms which include: 'Silver Dragon' which you might think of as variegated mondo and 'Silver Mist' which is smaller and is probably just variegated dwarf mondo.

There is considerable confusion about these plants. While I was a undergraduate student in Landscape Architecture at UGA, two graduate students were trying to figure out if a planting in the Founders Garden was spicata or some other grass. They talked to a number of people, who I realize now, should have known the answer, but they did not. I certainly did not know. When I go to the Founders Garden now, the same planting is still there 45 years later and it is obvious to me now that it is just mondo grass.


The Plants You Will Receive

Your plants are live, growing organisms. As such, they do not all look the same. Some will be older plants with larger corms. Others are young and just getting started. This picture shows a Liriope muscari 'Big Blue' that has been prepared for shipping. The top has been cut to reduce water loss. When you receive the plants, the roots will have dried somewhat from the form you see here. That is normal and does not hurt the plant. The life of the plant is in the bulbous rhizome from which the roots are growing. Some of the rhizomes will be larger than others. This is common with live plants. They are like us in that regard, but if planted correctly and immediately upon receipt, the plants will flourish. Please notice the portion of the plant that has been cut. That is the top! Please put it in the ground with that portion of the plant pointed up toward the sky. I know, I know--but remember I was in the landscape contracting business for seven years. "GREEN SIDE UP!" sounds stupid when laying sod, but I have actually had day laborers lay the darn stuff upside down. Most sods and even liriope and mondo will recover, but it takes a little longer. Upside down sod is hard to explain to a property owner.

Plant Protection
As soon as your plants arrive, you should open the box, spread the plants in a shady area, and water lightly. If you are not ready to plant at the time the plants arrive, I suggest that you cover the plants with a light layer of mulch and water the mulch and plants. This will provide the needed protection until you are ready to plant. If you cannot plant for a couple of days, moisten the mulch each day to protect the plants.

Bed Preparation
As with any plants, a properly prepared planting location is of great importance. It is not a complicated process, but it is an important process. During my years of landscape design and landscape contracting, I always considered the shape of the bed to be of great importance. This goes back to my LA training. If you design a shape that looks good on paper, it will usually look good on the ground. If the shape of the bed looks good on the ground, the overall beauty of the planting will be enhanced. We will talk more about design at a later time. For now we will assume that your bed is well designed and laid out.

The ground needs to be tilled to a depth of 2 to 4 inches. The closer you can get to 4 inches, the easier the planting will be. As you near the completion of the tilling, add a complete fertilizer to the bed. The exact fertilizer analysis and the proper amount can only be determined with a soil test. Often people at the farm supply warehouse in your area will be familiar with the needs of most soils in the area. They will know this by having provided fertilizer and lime to people who have come in having already had a soil analysis done. This is not the safest way, but it will work. When you have spread the fertilizer and any needed lime on your bed, run the tiller over the bed one more time to mix the fertilizer into the soil. You are now ready to apply mulch.

I recommend applying mulch at this point so you can get an even coat over the entire bed. The best mulch to use at planting time is ground pine bark. Apply about 2 inches of mulch. If your plants have arrived, you are ready to plant.

Spacing
I get a lot of questions about spacing of ground cover plants. The spacing you choose will depend on the rate of closure you want. If you want closure in the first season, put the plants 4 inches apart. Keep in mind that the plants will get overcrowded much more quickly and will need to be divided sooner. If you are patient, you can space the plants 12 to 18 inches apart. Keep in mind the mature size of the plants you are planting. If you are planting Liriope muscari, a good spacing that will usually provide full coverage during the second growing season would be 8 to 12 inches. On the other hand, if you are planting dwarf mondo, and you want coverage during the second season you will need to change that to 6 to 8 inches. You get the idea.

Planting
The bed is tilled, fertilizer has been added, and you have applied mulch to the bed. Now let's plant. Your bed will look much better while growing to full coverage if you set the plants in a regular pattern. You can use triangle spacing or square spacing. Square spacing is a little easier to keep up with than triangular spacing, though triangular spacing is visually more forgiving after the planting has been completed. Personally, I have used 1/2 inch rebar, a 2x4 board, and string to get the layout setup. The string is the least reliable because it gets pushed into a arch very easily. If you must use a string, mark each plant location along the string with a depression in the mulch and soil. Do not try to plant along the string. The plants will push the string as you plant causing you to create a curved line.

As you set the plants down through the mulch you applied, you will mix some of the mulch with the soil. That is great. You are enriching the soil and increasing the water holding capacity of the soil as you plant. Continue this process until all the plants are in the ground.

Watering
Some of you know that I recommend watering in shrubs and trees with a hose with no attachments on the end. That will not work with small ground cover. You will need to use a sprinkler attachment on the end of a hose, or if yours is a large bed, you may want to use an automatic sprinkler. The water needs to be applied slowly to prevent eroding the soil away from the roots of the plants. Be certain that you water long enough to wet the soil to the full depth that you tilled. Also, check your local watering restrictions. Do not start planting on a day that you cannot water.

Over-mulch
If you are planting your ground cover in the northern states, I would recommend that you apply another loose mulch over the plants before hard winter freezes begin. You can completely cover the bed. Pine straw would be a good material for this purpose. This will provide insulation for your plants. I will admit that I have never planted in a northern climate. Check with local experts to learn the best method for accomplishing this. When new growth begins to put on in the spring, you might want to remove the over-mulch if it has not settled down sufficiently. There again, check with local experts.

Enjoy your plants
You are now ready to watch your plants develop into a lush ground cover that you can enjoy for years. There are a few things that you will need to do on a regular basis to care for your plants, but for the most part, your plants will be carefree.

Now that you have the ground cover planted, you are ready to begin thinking about the next project you are going to tackle. It's time to go to Hoskins Garden Shop to start planning and getting ready to launch that new project. Remember, we are always ready to help with planning, design, planting, and care of your planting projects. Just email Randall for help.

Thanks for stopping by.

Pruning Crapemyrtles

The most important thing to remember about pruning crapemyrtle is that most crapemyrtles are small trees. As such, they should be pruned as trees. If you want a flowering shrub, buy something other that a crapemyrtle or buy a crapemyrtle that matures into a small plant. If you have questions about smaller crapemyrtles, please email Randall and I will be glad to give you advice on the best varieties to use. If we do not have the one you need, I can either get it for you from another nursery or put you in touch with someone who does grow it. Nothing takes the joy out of gardening like trying to force a plant to be something that is not natural for the plant, and pruning tree form crapemyrtles into shrubs is an unending task that I call CRAPE MURDER! Don’t do it. You now know better.

The steps in pruning are really very simple. One little bit of knowledge that I learned a long time ago from my horticulture professor at The University of Georgia, while working on a degree in Landscape Architecture, is of tremendous value in understanding the pruning process. Keeping this tip in mind while pruning has always helped me to do a better job of pruning and letting the plant work for me rather than against me.

Every terminal bud (the bud at the tip of the limb or stem) on a plant produces a growth retardant called auxin. This auxin travels back down the stem and retards the growth of each axillary bud along the stem. The axillary buds are the little dormant buds that you can see in the acute angle where each leaf is attached to the stem. These buds are also called lateral buds. The axillary buds will remain dormant as long as they continue to receive their steady dose of auxin. Occasionally one of these buds will break away and start growing, but not often. Now, if we remove the terminal bud from the stem, the production of auxin is stopped in that stem. Almost every dormant bud will begin to grow. The explanation as to why all of them do not become active is beyond the scope of this discussion. Let’s just assume that the first ones to become active begin to produce auxin thereby retarding the activation of some of the others. Many of you pinch the terminal buds of house plants to make them get fuller, but you never knew why. Maybe you didn’t even care, but now you know. Keep this in mind as you prune crape myrtles or any other plant. You can train plants to grow into the shape you want with very little effort if you remember this little tip.


When pruning crapemyrtles there are two basic forms that you are seeking to achieve. The most common form is the multi-trunk form. This is the form that most crapemyrtles will become if left alone. The second form is the single trunk or more commonly called ‘standard’. It is important to decide which form you are working toward when you first plant you crape myrtle. Begin immediately to work toward the desired form. By keeping the little tip that I gave in the text above in mind you can achieve the desired form with little work.

I consider that there are only four steps to pruning.

1. Remove dead wood. Cut the dead branches back to live wood. Make all you cuts carefully and just beyond a bud or another stem. Do not leave excess wood beyond the bud or stem because that wood will die and rot. This can cause desease in the plant.
2. Remove suckers. Suckers come up from the base of the plant. Simply cut the suckers as close to the ground as possible. Walter Reeves from the University of Georgia Ag Extension Service recently told about a chemical that will stop suckers. I will get the name of the substance and make it available in our online garden shop. Any of you who are in the southeast and can get Walter on WSB AM radio from Atlanta on Saturday morning would do well to listen to him.
3. Remove crossing limbs. If two limbs are crossing you have to choose which one you are going to remove. Back up, look at the overall plant, and decide which one is needed least. Cut it back to a bud or stem that is pointed in the direction that you would like to see the growth going.
4. Remove growth that is causing the plant to not be the shape you want. This will include growth that is just getting started in the wrong place or the wrong direction.

Crapemyrtles do not bleed when pruned. Therefore, do not spray the ugly black stuff on the wounds. If you attend to the pruning as needed you will never have large wounds that could cause disease. After the leaves have fallen off in the fall is the best time to do any serious pruning that is needed by the crapemyrtle. Take another look at them in the spring before leaves put on to see if you missed anything. During the growing season, you will see suckers come up from the base. I remove those as soon as they get started. Also, small growth will start along the trunks that will not be wanted. You can easily remove this growth with your fingers. Just rub it off the limb.
The bark of the crapemyrtle exfoliates. This is normal. In fact, the exfoliating bark of the crapemyrtle is one of the beautiful traits for which the crapemyrtle is known. Let the plants exfoliate naturally. In the fall, you can clean up the excess bark that has fallen around the plant. Put that bark in your compost pile.

Good luck with your new crapemyrtles. If you have questions, just email Randall. Please visit Hoskins Garden Shop online where you can find more plants to beautify your landscape. The online store is a new venture for us. It is taking longer to get products online than I realized it would take. I do want to provide plenty of information for our customers and those just looking for information. Providing that information for each plant is taking time. Be patient with us. In a few months we should have everything out there and be providing every need for your garden.

Planting Crapemyrtles

I have been getting a lot of request for information about planting crapemyrtles. I have always spelled it as crapemyrtle, but I am a little confused because MS Word always tells me I have misspelled the word. I have been seeing the plants listed by several nurseries as crape myrtles. Dr. Michael Dirr spells it the way I have always spelled it, so I am going to stick with crapemyrtle. Anyway, I am talking about Lagerstoemia indica.

I want us to discuss the planting of crapemyrtles. There are some key things to keep in mind when planting crapemyrtles:
1. Crapemyrtle is a small tree that will grow up to 25 feet tall depending on the variety.
2. There are many different varieties that will provide varying shapes and sizes.
3. Carl Whitcomb maintains that crapemyrtles unlike most other deciduous plants will not develop new roots during the cold winter months.
4. Crapemyrtles grow rather fast. I stuck about 4,000 crapemyrtles in to root during the first 2 weeks of May. Today, 9/9/2008, these same plants are about 3 feet tall. As you can see, they grow fast.
5. Crapemyrtles like sunshine. Carefully choose the location where you will plant your crapemyrtles.
6. Crapemyrtles are prone to develop powder mildew, black spot, sooty mold, tip blight, leaf spot, root rot, aphids and Florida wax scale.
7. But they are robust and usually overcome most problems. That sounds a little contradictory, but if you choose the right location for your crapemyrtles, they will do well.
8. I find that locating crapemyrtles in bright sunshine tends to solve a lot of their problems. In doing this, it is important to consider the plants around the location you are considering to determine what those plants will become 5, 10, and 15 years into the future.

Keep these points in mind as you plan the location and planting of your crapemyrtles. Now, let me lay out a list of steps that I feel are important when planting crapemyrtles. Many of these are steps that would pertain to several plants. You may have other steps that you feel are important. I would like to hear from you. Some of you will undoubtably point out that I missed some steps and I probably did. Sometimes it is easy to leave out steps concerning things that you have done so many times.

1. We recommend that you have the planting location prepared when your plants arrive. If the plants are to go into a bed as a grouping, you should till the soil in the bed to a depth of 4 inches to 6 inches. This will give you a good loose bed in which to plant any groundcover that will be planted after the crape myrtles are in place. This is important to prevent damage to the crapemyrtles after they are planted. It would also be a good idea to cover the bed with about 2 inches of mulch such as ground pine bark. Do not use freshly ground green mulch because when it gets mixed in with the soil it could mold and start some problems in the soil. Decomposed leaves will work well for this. If you do not have this material available, do not worry about it. You can add mulch after all the planting is done in the bed.
2. On the day your crapemyrtles are to arrive, dig the holes for your plants. Most crapemyrtles that we ship by USPS will be in 1 quart pots. This pot is also called a 4.5 inch deep pot. It has a volume of about 1.5 quarts. I recommend that you dig the hole twice the size of the pot. For a 1 quart pot that would mean the hole needs to be about 9 – 10 inches wide and about 10 inches deep. If you have placed a covering of fine mulch over the bed, you will be mixing some of the mulch into the soil that you dig out of the hole. That is a good thing. Loosen the soil that you have dug out, breaking up any large clumps of soil. You are now ready for your crapemyrtles.
3. As soon as the crapemyrtles arrive, open the shipping box, move the plants to a shady area and water the plants. Our plants have been grown in pine bark, so the watering will not create a muddy mess for you to deal with.
4. Move the crapemyrtles to the planting holes. Using one of the plants, go to each prepared hole and place enough soil back into the hole so that when you set the plant down into the hole, the top of the potting soil in the pot will be even with the surrounding soil.
5. Working with one plant at a time, remove the plant from the pot being careful to save roots that are growing out of the pot. If you loose some of the outside roots, that will be ok. In the nursery we normally just cut those outside roots away. You do what you want here, the plant will be fine either way. You will notice that some of the roots growing inside the pot have begun to circle the inside of the pot. Carefully loosen those roots so that they are pointing away from the plant. Begin adding the soil that you have around the hole. Keep spreading the roots as you add the soil. You can firm the soil a little, but do not pack the soil. Simply place the soil in the hole being sure to fill all the voids. You will see the purpose in this in step 7.
6. When the hole has been filled to the top, the top of the potting soil the crapemyrtle grew in and the soil you planted the crapemyrtle in should be at the same level. Now, I want you to create a little dam around the plant about 8 inches from the plant. When you water, this dam will help hold the water so it can soak slowly into the ground.
7. After all the crapemyrtles are in the ground, water each plant with a hose with no attachments on the end. You do not want to sprinkle the top of the plant, but rather, run the water directly around the base of the plant so that the hole is flooded. As the water goes down, it will carry the soil into air pockets that may have been left during planting. This is when you will realize the importance of having broken up the soil and having mixed in some of the mulch.
8. Mulch the plants. If you are working in a large bed that will receive groundcover or smaller shrubs, then just mulch around each crapemyrtle. Many materials are available in different parts of the country that are suitable for mulch. I recommend material that is inexpensive in your area. Pine straw is attractive and is good mulch. Bark nuggets of different types are available in most areas and will do a good job. It is important that you provide a good mulch around the plants that will cut down on evaporation from the soil (saving you money on water) thereby, allowing the plant to become established with good roots. You may be asking youself just how much mulch do you need. If you are using pine bark or pine nuggets, you need about 2-3 inches. Let the mulch get a little thinner close to the crapemyrtles. This will insure that you have good air circulation around the trunk of the plant. If using pine needles, you can put it about 6 inces thick. It will settle down over time. Inspect the mulch each spring and again in the fall. You will need to add a little mulch at least once a year. Remember, the mulch is being mixed with the soil as the mulch deccomposes and little critters work with the decomposing mulch and soil. This is where your mulch goes. Sometimes some might get washed out with heavy rain or blown out of the bed with heavy wind, but for the most part you mulch will be slowly decomposing and enriching your soil.
9. When you water, and I recommend that you water your plants once a week during the first season unless it has been raining a lot, give the plant a good soaking. This will encourage roots to develop deep into the soil. Deep roots will give the plant greater stability and will allow it to go after water that is naturally in the soil.

Now that you have the crapemyrtles in the ground, you are ready to begin thinking about the next project you are going to tackle. So I would recommend that you go to Hoskins Garden Shop online so you can start planning your next project. If you have questions, please email Randall so I can help you.