The Right Plant in the Right Place

As a gardener I can tell you that the most important concept in landscape design is getting the right plant in the right place.  If you do that, you can just stand back and watch things grow and make you look like a genius.  If you get it wrong, no amount of effort will cover for you.  It just won't work.  You can have the most fool proof plant and if you stick it in a bad spot it will languish and make you look like a fool.  So, much like Doctor's are always "practicing", so are gardeners.

Over the years I have destroyed a lot of plants.  I wish I had the money back on all of the plants I've mistreated and killed.  The most recent "problem area" has been the portion of the riverbed which is shaded by the maple tree.  I underestimated the depth of the shade cast by that tree.  And it only gets deeper as the tree grows.  This is compounded by the fact that the tree creeps in and steals water and nutrients much further out than its drip line.  Almost all of the riverbed gets shade for a portion of the day, but the closer you get the the tree, the bigger the problem.  I have replaced almost everything with Hosta at this point.  One last problem was this Morning Light Miscanthus.  It did OK for the first couple of years, but in this drier year it can't keep up.

It should be as high as my head.  This one pictured below is about 20 feet away and gets plenty of sun.  So the shaded one had to move.  I didn't decide to do this until last night as I was trying to fall asleep.  There are two other grasses I want to move and I have spots picked out for them but all of a sudden I realized I wanted to move this grass and I knew where it belonged.

It belongs over here.

Problem solved.

I was already planning to divide and transplant a big Hosta I have.  This Hosta gets full sun and normally it is happy, but it needed to be divided, and this dry year has made it look worse than usual. It really looked quite nice up until about three weeks ago.

Dividing and transplanting Hosta is so easy.  You just attack it with a shovel, hack it to pieces...

Rip it out by the roots, and plunk it in a hole somewhere else.  Heck you don't even have to plunk it in a hole.  Like Daylilies, you could kick it into a corner and ignore it for awhile and it wouldn't mind.  That's the thing about Hosta.  It never gives up, never pouts, and seldom wilts.

After you get done hacking at the original plant, fill the hole you created with the dirt you dug out of the holes where you are transplanting it to...

Fluff it out a bit.

And walk away.  Below is one of the two chunks I moved.  The Morning Light is just to its South West and that will provide even more shade for the Hosta

I have one more Hosta to add to this area.  The other day when I was dividing some other Hostas, I broke off one section on the edge with almost no roots.  

As you can see, it hasn't wilted a bit.  I stuck it in some compost and placed it in the shade of the sweet corn where I will remember to water it daily.  In a couple of weeks it will be ready to transplant into its permanent spot and won't mind if I forget to water it for a few days.