Rewilding My Lot

At the Park West Pollinator Garden, where I regularly volunteer, this week we were cutting back some of the more enthusiastic plants. Two of those were Horseherb aka Straggler Daisy (Calyptocarpus vialis) and Lyreleaf Sage (Salvia lyrata), and since I was familiar with both from my Houston garden I thought I’d bring some sprigs home to plant in my own little pollinator garden.

The timing was perfect, since we had had a soaking rain the night before and the soil was soft and damp in both the donor and recipient gardens. Having learned from earlier less than successful experiences here with transplanting plants from ground to ground, I think I’m a little wiser now. This is what I did:

• I chose pieces of plants from Park West that had plenty of roots.
• I trimmed the plants so that there were only a few inches of stem left, although I made sure to include nodes for future regrowth.
• I scraped shallow holes in the new ground and gave each hole a dose of  mycorrhizae root stimulant.
• I placed the plants in the holes, filled in the holes with original soil, stomped the soil down around each plant, and gave them a little water. (With the previous overnight rain and more coming a few hours later, the ground was already quite damp.)

So now at the back of my front flower bed are one Lyreleaf Sage and four Horseherb transplants. Both readily spread, hence their purging at Park West, so I will need to do my own control eventually. But in the meantime, they will fill the back area of the bed with pollinator-friendly plants. This back region gets hit by roof run-off (we have no gutters), and it’s space that I’ve left for future growth of young shrubs.

Lyreleaf Sage can form an evergreen ground cover, with taller flower heads. Here’s my new transplant with the flower stem cut short:

Horseherb is a shade-tolerant ground cover that may go dormant during winters. These are a couple of the new plants here: