The Volunteers

My understanding of what a garden is has shifted over my decades of gardening. When I began, I saw the garden as a kind of artistic product to be designed, created, and then maintained. Over time, I came to understand it more as a community of living plants that is always in process, always changing. The latter view has encouraged me to be more flexible and to welcome volunteers into the garden.

By “volunteers,” I mean plants that are growing in places where I did not plant them. Some of my volunteers are plants that I have invited into the garden and which then seed themselves around, popping up here and there. My most prolific self-seeders are spiderwort (Tradescantia virginiana), spotted beebalm (Monarda punctata) and Siberian irises (Iris sibirica). While I love all of these plants, they can become rather too much of a good thing, and I periodically pull up and discard the ones I don’t want. All of these plants have desirable qualities. Monarda punctata, for example, which can be quite thuggish in its behavior, is a magnet for a wide variety of pollinators. This is the plant that seems to be attracting the great black digger wasps (Sphex pensylvanicus), with their beautiful iridescent blue wings, to my garden. That alone is a good reason for welcoming it.

I never pull out spiderwort or Siberian iris plants without first letting them bloom so that I can see what color they are. The more generations these plants are from their nursery-purchased ancestors, the more genetic variation they exhibit, including a wider variety of colors. In the past two years, for example, I’ve seen several self-sown irises bloom in this lovely lavender color.

Geranium x oxonianum is another plant that shows more genetic variation after it has self-sown for several generations.  I planted two or three varieties of this early in my gardening career; and for many years, I assumed that Geranium x oxonianum was a sterile hybrid. Then, one year, a seedling popped up across the walkway from the parent plants. As the years have gone by, subsequent generations have become more and more prolific self-sowers. On my side slope, where I planted several of these near the top, they have now seeded themselves down the slope. I welcome these plants, with their clumps of attractive foliage and their long flowering arms that drape themselves over other plants and bloom all summer long. Until recently, all their flowers were a soft, clear pink, with either a salmony or a silvery undertone. In the past two years, however, I’ve been delighted to see some stronger hues with more of a red undertone.

Other volunteers in my garden are plants that were already growing on my property before I created the garden. These are often native wildflowers that can be useful and beautiful additions to the garden. Sometimes, I deliberately transplant these species into the garden and then let them spread. A good example is wild strawberries (Fragaria virginiana). When I created my side slope planting six years ago, I decided to add some wild strawberries, transplanted from elsewhere on my property, to see if they would make a good groundcover. The answer was Yes, and I have since added them to several other flower beds, where they are happily spreading. They have also appeared in flower beds where I did not plant them but where I am happy to see them. (I suspect some these grew from seeds transported in the digestive tract of chipmunks.) Another plant that I have transplanted and that is happy to grow in the garden is flax-leaved aster (Ionactis linarifolia). I am waiting to see whether these will spread further in the garden by self-seeding.

For many years, native goldenrods (Solidago) have grown on the wild edges of my garden. This past year, for the first time, I had this genus growing in flower beds. I  planted one species, zig-zag goldenrod (Solidago flexicaulis) in the new woodland border. Two additional species (which I have not yet identified) popped up on the front slope. The verdict is still out on whether the self-sown goldenrods will stay; at least one of them seems to be too tall for the location where it planted itself. Whether these particular volunteers stay or get edited out, however, as my understanding of the garden shifts again to focus on its role as part of a larger ecosystem, I will be looking for opportunities to welcome more and more native volunteers into my garden.