Then and now: covering the ground

When I got serious about gardening, at first I wanted what every self-respecting gardener wants: a beautiful, lush, soft lawn, the one that gives you sheer pleasure to sink your toes in.

Instead, I had patches of what even I could see were different varieties of grass:

I did everything possible to transform my mangy lawn. I watered it. I spread the fertilizer over it. I watered it again. When the gardeners employed by the complex were too tardy to mown it, I applied scissors to the blades that had grown too long.

I will not go into all the details. Suffice it to say that I spent hours pulling out those horrible thick tendrils of the kikuyu grass, like I heard it should be done, and then had nightmares about them; that I scattered many a seed over bald patches and watered them daily; that I was even known to carefully pull out the blades that had sprouted where they were not meant to sprout (in the flower beds) and transplant them where they were meant to grow (into the lawn).

Nothing helped. Everybody said that it was because the garden was not getting enough sun. I though it was because the complex gardeners did not do a very good job on my lawn, leaving the grass to grow too long and mowing it too short when they finally got round to it. I was even contemplating buying my own lawn mower, but several practical reasons stood in my way. Most importantly, I had nowhere to keep the contraption: my garden is too small for a shed, and there is no place for it inside the house.

I devised a way out: pave half the existing lawn and then concentrate my efforts on the remaining half. It would naturally follow that the results would be at least twice as good, right?

Wrong. I wisely left it to the professionals to create about three by four metres big patio. After they did their thing, I started working on the second half. I scattered some more seeds. I laid out the brick path in order to distract the eye from the still bald patches:

Then I noticed a dark green, rough and scraggy looking growth, a kind of weedy grass, in one corner of my garden. I pulled it out, and it spread. That was what made up my mind. The lawn had to go.

A variety of ground covers was to replace it, and a half-circle to the right of the brick path was to be covered with pebbles and stones (in order to cut down the watering times).

I approached the task methodically. I dug out all the remaining grass and hauled it away. Then I discovered that beneath a thin layer of very poor clay soil there was a ton of rubble left over from when the complex was built (no wonder the grass had refused to grow). So I dug some more, removed the rubble and quite a few stones, bought several bags of top soil and compost, laid out a brick path anew, spread out the soil and compost, covered it and waited for spring.

During the several months that followed I avoided going into the garden. It presented a bleak picture indeed:

At the end of August that year I set off to get the ground covers. I did a bit of research and knew that I wanted only low growing ones of different hues, to achieve a variegated look. I knew that peace-in-the house, which grows profusely in between the plants positioned against the south facing wall, would not do because it would wilt in the sunnier positions. So I chose pratia for its cheerful small blue flowers, penny royal for its scent, and another ground cover whose name I forgot, with light green leaves.

This is what the garden looked like with the newly planted ground cover plants (the maple tree in the centre of the pebbles has been moved since):

Three or four years on, the same area looks like this:

I can say that the Irish moss, the penny royal and the pratia proved to be real prizes, though, of course, they refused to contain themselves to the places I reserved for them; pratia soon overtook much of the Irish moss realm. But that was the least of my troubles. I can live with pratia taking over.

A bigger nuisance is the bright green ground cover whose name I forgot. It wilts in the heat of the summer. Even worse, it spreads like mad, or rather, it jumps – I find it five of more metres from where it was originally planted, growing between the Irish moss and pratia and overtaking them… To compound the problem, there is clover everywhere.

Most of the days you’ll find my on all fours trying the pluck out the two intruders without hurting the legitimate ground cover plants. Mission impossible, of course.

Ah, the never-ending battles a gardener has to fight!

Here are the close ups of the four kinds of ground cover plants I used in the central area: the pratia, Irish moss, penny royal and the no-name invasive one interwoven with clover (the yellow flowers are from the clover):





And this is peace-in-the-house, which grows in shady areas among the flower beds: