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Carpeted with plants

By Brenda Taylor Peterson
Special to the Herald

Of the Herald staffandscaped yards and gardens were not a high priority for pioneer farmers in the Columbia Basin.

The settlers were too busy trying to keep crops from blowing away in the spring, watered and weeded in the summer and harvested in the fall.

Somewhere in between, they built permanent homes and planted vegetable gardens and trees.

Barefoot children sent down the driveway to pick up the mail hopped from patch to patch of knotweed to avoid burning their feet on the scorching summer sand in barren yards.

Indeed, knotweed - a common, thick-growing, vining, prostrate plant that's also known as doorweed - may be the original Columbia Basin ground cover.

Some families encouraged knotweed to grow in their yards because it provided comfort underfoot, choked out other weeds and was durable enough for people to wipe their boots on before coming indoors.

Today, those remain prized elements for ground covers, said Claudia Kinder, of the Kinder Gardens nursery near Othello. Though she doesn't sell knotweed in her nursery, nor recommend it to her customers, Kinder is respectful of it, referring to it as a "native plant" instead of a weed.

After all, one person's weed is another person's flower, she said. "It just depends on what you decide to pull and what you leave."

Ruth Tuckett comes down solidly on the weed side of the debate. She pulls knotweed out of her yard as fast it appears.

There is no place for any "native plant" in Ruth and Ray Tuckett's well-tended gardens. In the spring, their landscaped yard is a landmark for travelers on Highway 17 between Mesa and Connell.

The driveway through their manicured yard is flanked by 150 feet of brilliantly colored creeping phlox, the preferred ground cover for the Tucketts and a lot of other gardeners. Motorists passing by early in the spring stop and ask them about the mass of pink and lavender color. Tuckett said she has given starts of the phlox to many visitors.

The phlox in the Tucketts' yard is partially shaded by trees but can be grown in full sun. Tuckett said her popular roadside attraction began about "10 to 15 years ago with 24 plants I got from an ad in the paper."

From small starts spaced about four feet apart, the plants have spread and grown together until there is no visible beginning or end to any single plant.

"I started with four colors, but today there are only three colors" and lavender seems to be taking over, Tuckett said.

While the Tucketts have lined a driveway with phlox, Dorothy Eppich of Basin City uses it on a steep hillside next to her house, along with barberry bushes and some annual flowers for color.

Eppich's phlox plants haven't spread as fast as the Tucketts', perhaps because she also has covered the hillside with red rock. Eppich said she likes the phlox for the "color they give in the spring."

Eppich landscaped another steep part of her yard with low-growing juniper shrubs. In its two shades of green, the dense mass of junipers provides a break between the driveway and grass side yard where children play.

Now that the junipers are established, Eppich said they need little in the way of maintenance.

To cover a toolshed in her yard, Eppich used Virginia creeper, an ivy-like plant.

"I just put a few starts along the bottom of the shed," she said, and today, the vine-covered building and neighboring horse pasture look like a postcard from New England.

She said the creeper could easily be used as a ground cover but warns it grows fast and dense. Eppich doesn't water the Virginia creeper these days. "It just gets what it can" when she waters the garden or pasture, she said.

Water requirements are one of the main things to keep in mind when selecting ground covers, Kinder said.

Sun tolerance, color and tolerance to foot traffic also are primary concerns for gardeners. But the main thing people are interested in is weed control, she added.

Few ground covers will provide weed control, particularly when they are first planted, Kinder said. Most people begin with a few widely spaced plants, and until they mature and grow into a mat, there are bound to be weeds, she said.

To cut down on weeds, Kinder suggests using a layer of overlapping newspapers covered with wood chips. The wood chips decompose and occasionally need to be replenished, but "newspaper is one of the last things to decompose in a landfill, so it works great."

Kinder has one area of her nursery she treated with newspaper and chips in 1990, and it still is providing effective weed control.

She doesn't recommend using newspaper with ground covers that are spread by their roots.

Kinder encourages gardeners to broaden their horizons when it comes to ground covers. Her definition extends to pretty much any perennial that covers the ground.

"You can cover the ground with what you want to grow, or Mother Nature will cover it for you," she said.

Kinder has an area in her nursery she calls the arboretum, where she grows and tests ground covers, shrubs, trees and other plants. One of the plants Kinder considers a ground cover that does well in the Columbia Basin is dianthus, a dense, low-growing plant.

It blooms in May after creeping phlox, "when everyone is so color-hungry," she said. Dianthus, once established, "provides great weed control."

Kinder has a 8-by-4-foot patch of Tiny Ruby dianthus that began a couple of years ago as three plugs and now is a 4-inch thick pink carpet in the spring.

Irish moss is another choice for ground cover. It is lower growing and slower spreading than dianthus. A lush velvet, this plant looks like it belongs on a forest floor, but it receives the same sunlight and water as all plants in the arboretum.

Although the dianthus and moss can be stepped on without damaging the plants, Kinder suggests making a path using stone steps.

David Salman, a horticulturist from Santa Fe who specializes in drought-tolerant plants, recommends creeping thymes, artemisia and ice plants as good ground covers for dry climates. They also are cold hardy.

These plants are deep rooted and after the first year of growth, require little water. Salman recommends not planting them in areas that will be heavily watered. They do require a season's care and water as they're getting established and fertilizer each fall, he said.

Although it is not necessary, Salman also gets rid of faded blooms by running a lawn mower, set to cut high, over them. He points out all perennial plants, including ground covers, do not bloom as long as annual flowers, which often bloom all summer and into the fall.

However, Becky Bauman and Donna Kasten are experimenting with wildflowers, hoping for a ground cover that blooms profusely all summer and fall. Bauman's family wildflower garden grows along the road in front of her house on North Road, 20 miles north of Pasco. Kasten planted her wildflower patch beside the entrance to the Othello Community Hospital.

Both used a commercial mix of flowers they purchased in boxes in variety stores. The flowers include annuals and perennials, but don't expect instant color.

For a garden wedding this spring, Bauman's daughter Joy planted a wildflower garden alongside her family's vegetable garden. By the wedding on June 1, it just looked "like a patch of weeds," Bauman said.

After Joy married and left home, care of the patch fell to her younger brothers, Rueben, 10, and Aaron, 8.

Today, the patch is just as pretty as the picture on the box of seeds. There are cosmos; Shirley poppies; California poppies; bachelor buttons; orange, yellow and peach-colored daisies; larkspur and other flowers.

The wildflower patch is in an area where it's "hard to grow things because it is rocky and on a slope, and water just runs right off," Bauman said.

Rueben said part of the success the flowers have had is because the soil was tilled and raked before it was seeded. A tree also provides some shade to the area and keeps the soil from drying too fast.

The Baumans planted enough seeds to cover 1,000 square feet, in an area about half that size. Aaron thinks this heavy seeding helped control the weeds. "If you do it really, really thick, it will choke out June grass and most weeds," he said.

Rueben agrees. "When we see weeds, we go out there and pull them out, but that is very rare," he said.

Kasten said she was slow to pull anything out she didn't recognize as a weed, and she "was careful at first not to tromp around," in the area.

"People came and asked, 'What are you doing with that patch?' It just looked like weeds," Kasten said. "Now they're saying, 'Oh! Those wildflowers are so pretty.' "

Whether you decide to experiment like Kasten and the Baumans or go with a time-tested solution like phlox, something is bound to happen.

As Kinder points out, "Unless the ground is sterilized, something is going to grow. That's part of Mother Nature's grand scheme."

-- Brenda Taylor Peterson is a free-lance writer who lives in Mesa.

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