All the Dirt on Gardening

Petunias under Dark Towers Penstemon Plan to divide your favorite spring blooming perennial flower. Before a plant takes over its allotted space and before it falls over from outgrowing its core, take a look at where you could transplant pieces of it where the root cuttings would thrive. At this time of year - after booms have faded in late summer and early fall - you can prune back the entire plant before digging, dividing, and transplanting. After pruning, use a shovel, fork or trowel to cut all the way around the plant's root ball. If the plant is woody and large, digging down far enough may require digging out a trench where you can get enough leverage to lift the roots without too much damage. Outside the drip line is the place to start. The outermost tip of the leaves where rain drips off is the drip line. Perennials make roots in the winter and stems in the spring and summer so dividing and transplanting now will give them ample opportunity to be...

The roots of perennial plants live for several years. Herbaceous perennials such as daylilies die back to the ground every year. Deciduous, woody, perennials have branches and stems all winter but lose all their leaves. Evergreen perennials such as boxwood keep their stems and leaves during the winter. Perennials not only return year after year, giving our gardens reliable beauty, but they increase in size providing more backbone to our gardens with more stems and flowers. Perennials grow taller, larger and wider, taking up more room as the years go by. Spring is the ideal time to divide many of them. There are four reasons to go to the work of digging, dividing and replanting them, including:   Some perennial clumps die out in the middle with age, others stop blooming and need to be rejuvenated, some get invasive weeds and grass in their roots, and others have grown too large for their location. In general, the perennials to divide in spring are those that bloom in the summer ...