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Ground Cover
BByorkshire
Posts: 9
We have a large section of garden on a fairly steep hill and exposed where I want to plant shrubs and trees. What can I use as ground cover around them to suppress weeds and remain low maintenance?
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Posts
I think I'd be looking at some of the ornamental grasses, planted in drifts they'd look gorgeous, the movements in the breeze would be lovely. Many of them would self-seed or spread by stolons so would colonise a bank quite easily - you could also mingle some hardy flowers amongst them to create a sort of prairie planting scheme - rudbeckias, verbascums, achilleas ............... it would look gorgeous and wouldn't require much looking after.
Some ideas here http://www.crocus.co.uk/features/_/articleid.1007/
Gardening in Central Norfolk on improved gritty moraine over chalk ... free-draining.
Hi BB - we have similar issue (very steep bank, needing ground cover between shrubs). On our soil, which is heavy clay with lots of rocks, the really easy ones are euphorbia amygdaloides (we have robbiae), and lady's mantle (alchemilla mollis). Both grow and spread like weeds, so they do need some cutting back / pulling out once a year - but for us they out-compete everything else and look very good for most of the year (lady's mantle is scruffy in winter, worth chopping it back then.) Also we have tons and tons of wild strawberries which aren't really tough enough to keep weeds down, but good at colonising where there is any bare space...
All the vincas are fast growing and have flowers, I planted it on a dry bank two years ago and now have to keep throwing it's plantlets onto the compost bin.