Covering Ground:
Unexpected Ideas for Landscaping with Colorful Low-Maintenance Ground Covers
Barbara W. Ellis, 2007
If you are interested in creating a ground cover garden on your property, this is the book for you. It is comprehensive and provides many creative ideas for a low-maintenance garden. The book is divided into three sections: (1) Rolling Out the Carpet, (2) Perfect Plants for Every Site and (3) Planting, Growing, and Propagating.
Rolling Out the Carpet tells you what to consider as you plan a ground cover garden. Ellis shows you to make the most of ground covers, which ground cover carpets are best for containers, and how to address problems areas of your yard. She writes about different ways to use ground covers. These could be planted as a lawn alternative, as streetside plantings, as temporary fillers, and as native plant carpets.
There is a list, the Dirty Dozen, Ellis considers to be the top twelve invasive plants. This list reminds us that ground cover choices are important because ground cover plants are usually quick spreaders and good soil retainers. But these attributes mean that some ground covers may be so difficult to control that you end up doing more work rather than less in the garden.
Perfect Plants for Every Site, the book’s second section, is divided into topics that show how different plants can be used to address different problem areas in your yard. Some of the topics are Ground Covers for a Sunny Slope, Shrubby Ground Covers, Ground Covers for Acid Soil, Grasses for Massing, Gound Huggers, Flowering Ground Covers, and Native Plants. As you can see, the possibilities she has outlined cover a very wide range of possibilities.
Each topic has a photograph and a description of an example ground cover garden with each plant identified. This is followed by photographs and descriptions of plants suitable for that type of ground cover garden.
The book’s third section, Planting, Growing, & Propagating covers site preparation, growing your own plants, planting, caring for new plants, and renovating ground cover gardens. Ellis has valuable advice about calculating the number of plants needed, the manner in which the plants will be watered, plant spacing patterns, the creation of temporary terraces for slopes, and planting over time.
This book is an incredible resource, but if you are seriously interested in creating ground cover gardens in your yard, I would suggest not only reading this book, but purchasing your own copy of the book. It takes quite a bit of time to read the whole book, and you will want to refer to it, not only while planning your ground cover garden, but time and time again as you proceed with your project.
Submitted by Holly Sparrow, Headwaters Master Gardener