Be Clairvoyant after a Heavy Rain

See What your Garden Wants You to Do

I love visiting my garden after a heavy rain. Plants and weeds seems to have grown overnight. Some perennials lay flat in garden beds with blossoms intact. Tree limbs droop and have to be pushed aside to pass.

Nature makes clear to me what needs to be done.

Stake Up Perennials

Big, healthy tall perennials especially bee balm fall over after getting pounded by rain. The flopping plant is not as worrisome as the plant that gets fallen onto.

Understory plants lose their air circulation, are deprived of light and die. Staking plants before they get too bent and broken helps preserve your garden’s health and clean look.

Locate the plant stakes of your choice and prop the plant up all the way around . You need to support the stems at least halfway up like we did for this bee balm. The foliage should stay supported when the next rain comes. I like these “linking” stakes because I can make them fit any size perennial, as shown below. I reuse them as garden needs change.

Lighten up Crowded plants

Liatris is one of my favorite perennials because of it’s tall soft pastel-color blooms.

I have been trying to figure out where my liatris have gone as other plants start coming up. I run my hands through wet leaves and the areas they were last year and find the answer! My liatris are getting crowded out by my tall phlox.

In a case of two bloomers fighting for space, I pull up the less desirable. I love tall phlox, but liatris is more important to me because of it’s tremendous value in the winter for birds and insects.

It’s really easy and super satisfying to pull an unwanted plant or weed out by the roots after a heavy rain. Just 2 or 3 tugs does the trick.

The liatris plant can now breathe and grow!

Look for Plants Getting Smothered

Here I find my recently flowering Carlesii viburnum laying on my Justin Brouwer boxwoods. Horrors!

The viburnum is the one I will cut back. (Richmond-ers always sacrifice other plants for their boxwoods.)

The viburnum is tough as nails and will thrive and bloom however I prune it. My dwarf boxwoods on the other hand need to stay spherical and green to serve their purpose in ‘backing up’ my small fountain..not the dog.

Hannah my wonderful gardener friend cuts off, tip prunes and lifts the lower branches of the viburnum shrub. This is called ‘pleaching’.

Sacrificing Blooms

This pink cranesbill geranium spread like crazy after this last rain! It is starting to travel far and wide into other plants. It’s even traveling up the trunk of my bonsai spruce (an experimental focal point).

My clairvoyant brain says…“No good will come of this.” The evergreen spruce will defoliate, and my stone steppers to the bird feeder will be covered if the geranium keeps spreading. We will be cutting off some flowers in bloom but gardeners have to have a streak of heartlessness sometimes. Prune away!

No hitch hikers

Verbena bonariensis is a fabulous perennial that likes to ‘tag along for the ride’. It spreads like crazy and will pop up everywhere.

I love the tall color and the magnate this plant serves in attracting goldfinch. I have seen dozens of goldfinch launch off the plants’ long stems in a blur of yellow.

Because of its value as a pollinator to the birds and bees, I allow it to grow in clumps in between my plants, but not inside them. No hitchhikers allowed.

Branches that lay on the ground after a heavy rain..have got to go.

In this case, the whole snowball viburnum needed to be reshaped. The rain made that obvious. Luckily it had just finished blooming which is when you should prune flowering shrubs anyway.

For the red jap maple below, just ‘tip prune’ the ends of branches a few feet up so the lawn mower doesn’t shred the leaves and branches.

People paths

Clear a very narrow space throughout your perennials for air circulation. Getting soaking wet from trying to weed long after a rain is a sign that you need to prevent the ‘jungle’ look.

Dog paths

I don’t know if dog paths are revealed by heavy rain, but dog paths certainly get muddy because of it!

We love our dogs so don’t fight the tromped paths they may make. The more we try to keep dogs away from our gardens the more stress it causes everyone!

Let your four legged family have their defined dog runs through the garden. Hopefully if a path is defined, dogs will use it as their single detour. The best thing for aesthetics is to keep the dog trot weeded and clean looking. People will forgive you the path if it is manicured!

Christie lives in Manakin Sabot , Virginia where she manages a 3 acre garden. Her blogs are written from her 35 years as a personal and professional gardener.