Digging in: The heat is on 

By Peter Wimberg

(Published September 2024) Dare we think about fall?  Spending a few moments on social media will have you believing fall is here, leaves are turning, and days and nights are crisp and cool.  As we enter the fall months, I think it’s a good time to dispel some long-held garden beliefs and practices. Old, outdated garden practices seem to live forever, and are continuously being applied to modern gardens. It’s not a mystery as to why, though. New gardeners jump on Google, type in a question and answers, both valuable and rubbish, appear in equal measure. 

One article or blog from 10 years ago praising the use of landscaping fabric in the garden multiplied a dozen times over as it inspired others to post about the practice or in many cases simply plagiarized the original post. Now the internet is awash with posts on how weeds will be a thing of the past and gardening will be a breeze if you use landscaping fabric. Those who know the fabric is not all it was promised to be are bristling at the thought as they read this.  

As modern gardeners with years of experience, we must get the word out about outdated practices, many of which are useless to bordering on harmful, and present a smarter way to approach garden care.  If you haven’t guessed already, garden fabric is out. How grand it will be to never to find it in a garden again. One can dream!

Next on the practices to dispel list: putting the garden to bed. Older ways of gardening, when landscapes consisted of a row of the same evergreen shrub, a small bed for annuals, a few trees and perhaps a smattering of perennials, announced now’s the time to put the garden to bed. As if on cue, gardeners set out, pruners and rakes in hand, to cut back perennials and annuals, rake the leaves, and add fresh mulch to now bare garden beds.  To them, the garden season is over, and all remnants of the summer garden must be quickly whisked away.  

A modern garden, one that is planted with a more diverse plant offering with plants that bloom well into fall and are attractive in the winter, calls for gardeners to rush out to the garden and just look. Just look at the still heavy bee and butterfly activity in the garden. Just look at all the pairs of Goldfinches darting about the seeds of Echinacea and Rudbeckia. Just look at the grasses showing off beautiful fall colors. 

Perhaps the most difficult garden myth to put to bed is the idea that the garden has a beginning and an end. When we plant with nature in mind, our gardens are still as vital and active in the fall as they were when in summer’s full bloom. Will snow or cold temperatures finally call an end to the gardens’ season? No. Seedheads continue to feed foraging birds and small mammals, tufts of native grasses are habitat and host plants for many native insects and moths, and hollow, pithy stems which are still standing tall in the garden, will be homes for next year’s native bees.  A garden has no beginning or end.  

Instead of thinking that we are approaching the end of the garden season, I say we look at this as starting the next phase of the garden. Instead of pruners in hand, let’s walk about the gardens with notebooks and create a fall to-do list. Where can we add more plants to offer fall blooms? Where can we add more plants that will transition to caches of seeds, such as Rudbeckia and Echinacea?  Where can we swap out expanses of shredded mulch for, in the least pine straw, or better yet, more perennials? And, if you are so bold, where can we edit a few repetitive plants, and create more plant diversity in the landscape? Remember, there’s no hard and fast rule that your house must have a line of the same shrub running along the foundation. Perhaps this fall, we will update the landscape with a variety of shrubs to lend new colors, interesting berries and flowers, and most importantly, plant diversity.

Peter Wimberg is the president of Wimberg Landscaping, a full-service landscaping firm that has been in operation for more than 44 years. Peter is a strong proponent of planting with nature. The Wimberg office and its extensive pollinator gardens are located at 1354 US Route 50 in Milford, Ohio. For more on his gardening philosophy, go to wimberglandscaping/changing-the-landscape.