In the rhythm of the gardening year, you spend two or three months planting and adding things and then two to three months digging up or removing things. The turning point, for me, is somewhere in late July. For the last few weeks most of my gardening work has involved deadheading and cutting back and removing the ugly a little at a time, both in the vegetable garden and the general landscape. Now that we are in September, I am also moving things around. This is the second best time to divide and relocate perennials. The best time is in April when they are still dormant so they can wake up in their new location. But there are things that I've looked at now for months and I just can't wait any longer to deal with it.
One of those things is this huge clump of Carex Ice Dance that is right by the steps to our side door. A few years ago I dug this out and left just a few little plants. I relocated the bulk of the grass and have divided it since into many other plants. It took about three years to come back bigger than ever. This is the location where the vole or field mouse made a nice snug nest under the snow bank and ate off the roots of my favorite Echinacea plants. I am also digging out an eliminating any "Deerlilies" that are not my favorites. There are some I am willing to fight for, but others that were just background plantings. Today I dug out three of those and replaced them with this nice grass that the deer don't eat and which is evergreen so it prefers to be left uncut in the fall. Low maintenance! The look of the grass is similar to the lily foliage so you can barely tell that I've changed anything.
These few little whisps of plant left undisturbed will grow next year and fill in. Every fall we cut back all of our ornamental grasses and daylilies. The reason for this is if I leave them, they turn into a soggy mess that is difficult to clean up in the spring because the sogginess makes them impossible to cut with any of the tools that I regularly use. And when you have hundreds of clumps to deal with you can't mess around. I am already cutting back any dried up or unruly plants. Every wheelbarrow load that I take out now is one less to deal with on clean-up day.
