[ Lost in the Landscape ]

bog chronicles

Sev­eral ponds and a water­fall came with the house when we moved in a cou­ple decades ago. They looked cool and the water­fall con­tin­ues to pro­vide a nice gur­gling noise that helps mask the usual din of a res­i­den­tial neigh­bor­hood. Unfor­tu­nately, as the years passed, the ponds began to fail or show their shortcomings.

One of them was so tiny it was good for breed­ing mos­qui­tos and not much else. It got turned into a planter pretty quickly.

The mid-sized pond turned out to be a crit­ter mag­net. Rum­mag­ing pos­sums and rac­coons ate all the fish and reg­u­larly upturned any water plants. Two years back it became my first bog gar­den, and is today filled with car­niv­o­rous sun­dews and pitcher plants. I was con­cerned about how much water a bog gar­den would require, but last year I fig­ured it out that it required only about as much water as an equiv­a­lent patch of grass.

Maybe five years ago it became appar­ent that we had a grow­ing leak on the largest pair of ponds and link­ing water­fall. The con­crete that made up the ponds was fine, but plant roots were pry­ing up the dec­o­ra­tive rocks that had been mortared on top to make the ponds look like a vol­canic grotto. I divided the upper pond in two, leav­ing the front half to cas­cade the water into the lower pond. The back half became yet another planter. Noth­ing seemed to do well there, though, so I decided to try turn­ing it into another bog for my grow­ing pitcher plant collection.

I started by remov­ing sev­eral hun­dred pounds of dirt. Tak­ing away the dirt exposed the rea­son why noth­ing seemed to thrive in the bed. The sur­round plants had sent their roots into the planter and sucked up what­ever irri­ga­tion I pro­vided to the plants I wanted to thrive there. I did a bru­tal prun­ing on all the adven­tur­ing roots, but fig­ured that they’d be back when offered moist soil to wan­der into.

To keep roots out of the bog I decided to con­tainer­ized the bog plants in plas­tic stor­age tubs from Tar­get. I could water the plants in the tubs and leave the sur­round­ing soil dry, reduc­ing the attrac­tion for maraud­ing roots. I used two six­teen by twenty-two inch con­tain­ers that were a foot deep plus a smaller one on the end.

I packed dirt around the tubs to sta­bi­lize them, then filled them up with a 60/40 blend of sphag­num peat moss and washed plas­ter sand, the sort of acid, low-nutrition soil that most car­ni­vores pre­fer to grow in. Finally, after sev­eral hours of hard labor of the sort the sort that I think my doc­tor is about to tell me I can’t do any­more, I got to install the plants.

I selected sev­eral species of taller-growing pitcher plants to form the main plant­ing, Sar­race­nia flava, S. alata and S. oreophila. From my research I fig­ured out that these often grow nat­u­rally far­ther from water sources or in areas where the bogs dry out for part of the year. As far as pitcher plants go, these all should prove to be fairly drought tol­er­ant. Still “drought tol­er­ant” is a rel­a­tive term, and they’ll need to be kept at least damp year-round.

To fin­ish off the plant­ing, and to par­tially assuage my guilt at not using native plants, I sur­rounded one of the tubs with divi­sions of one of my native rushes, Jun­cus patens, a ripar­ian plant that doesn’t seem to resent dry­ing out. Another bonus of this species is that it looks good through­out the year, some­thing that can’t be said for these pitcher plants, which counter their sev­eral months of look­ing severely cool and amaz­ing with sev­eral months of look­ing dying and pathetic.

I’ll post progress pho­tos as the young new bog plants begin to fill and and show their poten­tial. I’m hop­ing this won’t turn into another failed pond.

March 17 2010 06:30 am | Categories: gardening • my garden | Tags: bog garden • bog plants • Juncus patens • sarracenia

6 Responses to “bog chronicles”

1. wiseacre on 17 Mar 2010 at 11:13 am #

   It will be inter­est­ing to see how it works out. I’m so tempted to for­age some wild Sun­dew for a mini bog of my own.

2. Loree / danger garden on 17 Mar 2010 at 7:23 pm #

   Wow sounds like a lot of hard work! I look for­ward to more pictures.

3. Noelle/azplantlady on 17 Mar 2010 at 10:49 pm #

   What a great alter­na­tive to an aging water feature.

4. ryan on 18 Mar 2010 at 10:07 pm #

   Should look really cool and unique. I can’t imag­ine that any­one else has a plant­ing like it.

5. Ruth on 20 Mar 2010 at 7:03 pm #

   Your bogs sound very cool! I like pitcher plants very much and will look for­ward to more pic­tures.

6. Wendy on 22 Mar 2010 at 5:04 am #

   It looks won­der­ful! I have an idea for you. Will post about it later in the week when I get a chance.

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