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Corner Make-over in Old Greenbelt

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Did you ever notice this weedy mess at the corner of Westway and Ridge Road, diagonal from Mishkan Torah? Weed shrubs were blocking driver visibility – MY visibility, since this corner was on my regular route home. Walking by, I noticed that the dominant plant was poison ivy. The whole thing began to really annoy me.

So in August I started clearing the spot of all the climbing vines and assorted weeds, fallen branches and trash buried beneath it all. It was good, wholesome exercise for the most part – the exception being the 10 or so wasp stings and the poison ivy I encountered, despite my best precautions.

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After the wasp attacks I stayed away for a while, hoping that they’d DIE and sure enough, after a couple of cool evenings they were just a bad memory, and the month of October was was great for planting. Here’s the result, so far.

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The plants are all full-grown and donated – the best kind of plants! Toward the back are six large Carexes (they look like ornamental grasses) and a Spirea variety called ‘Ogon.’ Its willow-like chartreuse leaves make it a focal point for most of the year. In the foreground is another Carex, a much shorter one called ‘Ice Dance’ that I’ve grown for 30 years. It looks like variegated Liriope but fills in more quickly. And I happened to have plenty of it.

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Coming next season are blooms of daffodils, black-eyed Susans (our state flower), daylilies and an unidentified tall Sedum.

It Takes a Village

The Susans and Sedums, big clumps of them, were “passalong” plants from the awesome garden of Mary Lou Williamson. She also purchased some daffodils for the spot. More plants were donated by Connie Davis, Lola Skolnik and Dorrie Bates. Actually, the make-over would have been impossible without another donation from Dorrie and Richard Bates – the use of their water during this long drought we’re in.

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Paul Downs and Susan Barnett helped with the digging.

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Someone else who helped was Ronnie Sookram, manager of maintenance for GHI. He happened to drive by and see me working on the spot and stopped to offer help – despite this being city property, not GHI – and I took him up on his generous offer. He supplied 2 yards of mulch and critically, the boards and stakes you see here that will, we hope, hold the soil in place until the plants fill in.

And before planting anything here I needed permission from Brian Townsend, Greenbelt’s Horticulture Supervisor. Brian approved the make-over and, to improve driver visibility even more, scheduled the removal of a few weed trees near the street. And he was enthusiastic about the plants donated for the site.

Pretty and Low-Maintenance 

When a neighbor asked why I was doing all this I could only answer: “To make it pretty.”

But there’s another reason – to create a low-maintenance demonstration garden that might help other gardeners and gardener-wannabees create gardens that are pretty with almost no work. So the plants here are drought-tolerant enough to survive with no supplemental watering after their roots have settled in – in this case by next spring. And of course no fertilizers or pesticides will be needed. There WILL be quite a bit of weeding to do next year but very little in subsequent years after the groundcover plants have filled in and there’s no more disturbance of the soil to bring weed seeds to the surface.

My years of gardening and especially garden-coaching have taught me that the secret to creating low-maintenance gardens is the use of shrubs and small trees, groundcovers that really cover the ground – all year – and masses of super-tough, trouble-free perennials like the ones you see here. Oh, and daffodils – because the critters don’t eat them and most of them last forever.

Follow Susan Harris:
Susan started blogging about Greenbelt soon after moving here in 2012, and that first blog has grown into this nonprofit community website. She also created and curates the Greenbelt Maryland YouTube channel. In 2021 Susan joined the Board of Directors of Greenbelt Access TV. Retired from garden writing and teaching, she continues to blog at GardenRant.com.

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