Sunday 19 November 2017

Cultivating Liriope And Ornamental Grass

By Stephanie Brown


Every good garden needs to be bordered with something. Many gardeners will put in miniature fences, rubber barriers, bricks, or stone in order to hold in the mulch set around flowers and shrubs. Others prefer a natural boundary, planting liriope and ornamental grass around the edges of gardens, pine islands, and driveways.

Such bordering grasses require consistent monitoring and upkeep in order to prevent them from taking over the entire garden bed. Without a dutiful gardener present, some forms of this plant can take over a whole lawn. This might not be such a problem when it comes to the lawn, as it lessens the need for mowing, but it can be a serious problem if it takes over flower or vegetable beds.

Bordering grasses such as L. Spicata, also known as monkey-grass, grow in runners and can fill an area quite thickly in a short span of time. For this reason, this particular species is regarded as invasive. L. Muscari is a much less invasive form of such greenery, but these grasses are routinely mislabeled when being sold to gardeners.

It is the potential for it to take over large areas that makes it potentially harmful to local plant species. This is especially true when it comes to destroying indigenous grasses. When an indigenous species gets crowded out of an area, the entire landscape can be forever altered, impacting other living things.

A foreign species can find its way to our shores as easily as hitching a ride in the grooves on the bottom of a pair of shoes. Many plants, and even some animals have been moved from one part of the Globe to another in this manner. Some are brought over intentionally for the purpose of landscaping.

Kudzu is a perfect example of how an intentionally introduced foreign plant created an ecological disaster here in North America. Originally it was brought from China BECAUSE it is invasive, and therefore they felt that it would be easily cultivated. They had hoped to feed it to livestock here in the States, but it turned out that animals detest the flavor.

Kudzu contains over four hundred pounds of roots for every six foot by six foot patch. There is simply no way to completely eradicate it from an area unless it is bulldozed about ten feet deep and the dirt discarded elsewhere. This is just what they did, discarding the dirt near railroad lines in order to keep the weed growth off the rails.

Because it has literally hundreds of pounds of roots in every small patch, no human can really dig it up. Burning it is only a temporary solution, and one would wish to avoid doing that when the season is extremely dry. Bulldozing an area to around ten feet deep then discarding the dirt, or scorching it free of all life forms, is the only method of eradication which has shown promise.

In the future, we human beings really should give more thought to how we move living things around. The consequences of careless stewardship of our planet can clearly be seen. The birds of island nations die off due to house-cats, the insect world belongs to the German roach, and kudzu eats Georgia plantations whole.




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