On Liriope...and a Confession

I always ask myself, why does someone who loves diversity and local plants have so much damn Liriope in the garden?
Then I tell myself about one of the reasons: dogs.

When I turned the soil in the only sunny place in the front yard, I was dreaming of produce. I put in vegetables, herbs and heritage plants right where someone could pick from the sidewalk if they were motivated.

Then, this lady let her dog walk up into the bed to piss on the dill. My anticipation of fresh salad ingredients died right then. The dill died later, after taking a hit from every other dog in the neighborhood.
(By the way, the lady was none other than our neighborhood association president.)

Now everything I plant along the sidewalk is inedible, and piss-resistant, and cheap to replace when it does succumb. Ergo, the Liriope muscari, aka, monkey grass. Once you have one patch, you have a source for endless division. This is what I call a place-holder plant, but in this case, it probably won't get switched out.

You might ask why I don’t buy a few packages of seeds to get thrift and some interesting diversity too. Good question!

Here’s my confession: I am crap at starting seeds. They are like baby birds, needing time and devotion and I resent that. I neglect them one day and they mummify. The pots get knocked off the windowsill by a breeze, or by a crazy dog, or by the blinds crashing down. When I direct sow, one plant will emerge, and it will be growing in the neighbor’s driveway, maybe.

So I go for bulbs and rhizomes and roots that take a long time to notice they are out of the dirt. Cactus pads, stalks that root, corms, epiphytes—I’m all over them like a cheap suit.

Still, I look at the seed racks in the nursery and feel defective as a gardener. I truly admire people who collect seeds for next year and grow a real garden from them.

Theory of Place-Holder Plants

...shown in a very roundabout way by hurricane debris. Everyone here has a hedge-sort-of-thing between the street and sidewalk, courtesy of Hurricane Ike.

My own Ike hedge is modest, since much debris is now in the compost.

In the middle of the mess, schoolhouse lilies (Rhodophiala bifida) are looking weary but present.


I had schemes for robust, useful, and fabulous plantings of the "hell strip". They were further incited by a look at this Seattle blog, Greenwalks. Up till now, my strip was practically a monoculture of liriope spiked with some bulbs, a parsley hawthorne youngster, and some oaks. When we moved in here, the front "garden" was a mud flat migrating to the curb. I took emergency measures to stabilize it: I dug enough clumps of liriope from our old home to make hundreds of transplants for the hell strip. Then on Thanksgiving Day I enlisted all family members to plant them. That day, my Theory of Place-Holder Plants was born.

Say you have some place to plant, but what you want to plant there is out of season/stock/budget. I say go ahead and put in free, tough, boring plants to hold the place. They help keep the soil in the beds loose and inhabited. They are a little like cover crops. When the plants you really want arrive, out go the place-holder plants.

Who knows when the city will collect all this biomass thrown down by the hurricane. I am now quite pleased that there is not much but liriope growing under the pile. Liriope will survive. Some day, I will make a more creative planting of the hell strip, but I will always keep a place for another hurricane hedge.