Focusing on perennials

There’s lots you can get on with now, says Ruth

- Ruth Hayes

IN the world of gardening, few things are more satisfying than sorting out a long-standing niggling problem. The top end of one of the borders in our back garden had become thoroughly congested with perennials that had outgrown their space and were jostling for room.

Matters haven’t been helped by a very invasive Japanese anemone that we have been trying to contain without overall success since we moved here eight years ago. It looks lovely in its place, but refuses to stay there and keeps snarling up the other plants and, thanks to a deeply spreading, root system is very difficult to remove.

The whole site looked an absolute mess and grated every time I saw it, so one morning I grasped the nettle and sorted it out.

My tasks included lifting and dividing a massive, but beautiful, ornamental thistle and freeing it from the Japanese anemone growing through its roots, moving a pulmonaria to a more appropriate location and finding a new home for a young sea holly that was being crowded out by a globe thistle.

As long as your soil isn’t frozen or waterlogged, midwinter is the perfect time to relocate and divide perennials while they are in their dormant state.

The benefits are immense. When plants get too large, their flowering ability often drops off and they start to look unkempt and straggly.

By dividing them you are creating lots of smaller, more productive plants to go elsewhere in the garden and adding to your stock without any financial outlay.

Very often the centre of older become woody and productive, so compost em and just keep the ew divisions.

If you are moving plants without splitting hem, lift with plants of soil around the roots andp ant at the same depth as y were growing usly. Always firm them in well and water generously. I also used the time to cut back last year’s growth to make room for new shoots, and thoroughly weed the beds.