Self-Sowers
Add a little romance in your garden
“A weed is a plant that has mastered every skill except for learning how to grow in rows.”
🌿 Doug Larson
Worth a little time: Self-sowers
When we are looking to build atmosphere in the garden, we need to find some plants that will play well and help us in that direction. Though there is something wonderfully restful about a Kitchen garden with everything neatly in rows, there is another magic in a garden that seems to have created itself. A garden with romantic atmosphere will likely not have everything in rows, but instead will welcome real exuberance in plant growth.
Plants which are hardy enough to seed themselves around are in shorter supply in colder climates, but there are still a few that add some filler and atmosphere to our garden at Havenwood. Most of these plants fall in the hardy annual or biennial categories. These are plants that grow for one or two years, but because they reseed themselves, they do not require any extra water or support.
These plants can, however, take some extra time because they need to be shepherded—transplanted, thinned, and managed. But I think that the little time I spend (maybe a couple hours per year), far outweighs the amount of flower power I get out of them every year in spring and summer. Columbine (Aquilegia), Borage (Borago officinalis), Love-in-a-Mist (Nigella), Larkspur, Cosmos, and Alyssum are a few cultivated flowers that we have reseeded here for many years.
Here are a few more self-sowers that grow well at Havenwood:
Christopher Lloyd: On self-sowers
“Gardens that give space to self-sowers have a comfortable, personal feel. These plants fill a gap and are wonderful accessories in our overall aim of keeping the show going.
Many people are frightened of self-sowers, thinking that, if allowed, they will lose control and that their garden will look a mess. So they apply thick mulches to prevent this. What they are missing!
However, a balance does need to be maintained. In a garden overrun by fennel, you'll be able to see nothing else by midsummer, though it is still nice to have a few of them growing in awkward cracks, between a wall and paving, say, where you wouldn't be able to plant anything yourself. I don't like to see Alchemilla mollis taking over, uncontrolled. It gets trodden on and bruised.
You need to think of self-sowers as allies that need to be controlled. You'll probably be weeding out 95% of them. That's all right. Those that remain will do their job all the better for not having too much competition. The purple-leaved strain of orach, Atriplex hortensis, grows to 2m, casting quite a bit of shade. Just one of it, rather than 10, will do the job nicely.”1
Romantic self-sowers
This topic reminds me of one of my favorite passages from Ben Dark’s book, The Grove:
“Romance is a thin paint and is built up in layers… There can be no beauty in the cracks if everything is weeded the second it appears."
I was fortunate to get to ask Ben a question about this delicate balance between allowing things to self-sow and where it creates too much extra work in his interview in May:
Julie: Where do you think the line is between "benign neglect" and nincompoopery?
Ben: Another excellent question. I’m in a rented garden in Copenhagen at the moment and the previous occupants have obviously emptied a few packets of wildflower mix over the borders at some point. It must have been a meadow blend because it’s full of Achillea millefolium. Great plant but too straggly for a border and too flat and see-through in spring without the meadow grass backdrop. I love the summer flowers but I’ve been pulling it out for things that look better year round.
The obvious answer is that nincompoopery begins when the neglect is creating more future work – letting ground elder grow through herbaceous borders, for example – or damaging other plants. I’d never call a failure to achieve the desired look nincompoopery, though. I’d call it gardening!
The self-sowers in my garden are achillea ptarmica ‘Peter Cottontail,’ lovely white spring blooming anemone, lady’s mantle, and tall purple verbena. I love them all.
I love the Centaurea 'Emperor William' for a self-seeder... its deep blue single flowers are lovely and the dusty-green of the leaves airy and light. I planted it from seed a few years back in one of my flower beds and it has faithfully re-seeded itself since then.