Plantwise
Step on Me - Please!
While researching an article recently, I paid a visit to Fran Hopkins, founder and president of the company that turned the word Stepables into a virtual synonym for ground cover plants.
Tempted by the prospect of seeing many examples of established ground covers in situ, my friend and I hit I-5 en route to Salem before 8 am on a sunny Sunday morning, fueled by excellent coffee and bakery treats.
Given the company’s substantial marketing prowess – Stepables are the extremely popular ground cover plants that come in the highly visible purple, 4-inch pots with the fancy foot logo on the label – I expected to meet a possibly staid corporate leader who would walk me through her garden pointing out labeled examples of her company’s plant offerings in a dry, scholarly voice. Au contraire! – we met a friendly, affable bundle of energy (at 9 am Sunday morning, no less!) in a slinky hot purply-pink shirt, driven by a mission to spread these easy-care ground cover plants to people across the country and beyond.
Today, Fran spends most of her day in the marketing end of the business. But her background in retail shines through in her efforts to ensure that gardeners buy the right plant for the right place and experience success with their selections. Informative, detailed labeling is an important part of that, as is the highly interactive website.
Our garden tour revealed plants both familiar and unfamiliar to me. There were ground cover classics like baby’s tears, scotch moss, and blue star creeper but also some less common plants like Mazus reptans, miniature wire vine (Muehlenbeckia axillaris) and Leptinella squalida ‘Platt’s Black’. Seeing these delicious, touchable mats of foliage peeking out from beneath grasses, filling in cracks between pavers and draping over stone walls was quite inspiring. I’ve always liked the tapestry effect of ground covers but I kept flashing to a few recalcitrant places in my own garden where bare ground lies, unadorned and naked. “I wonder if this would work there?” kept running through my head…
Much of our time was spent stepping on plants and wiggling our toes in fresh green (or burgundy, bronze or golden) mounds of ground cover plants. According to Hopkins, it’s important to step on your Stepables. Why? Because many ground cover plants naturally hump up in the center – then the center dies. By stepping on the plant, you are pressing its stems in contact with the ground, thereby helping it root and grow more quickly. Not to say that you should grind your feet into your ground covers – just that regular, firm foot contact is actually useful for many low, matting plants – especially those that have soft, herbaceous stems (not so much the creeping woody shrubs like, say, creeping cotoneaster).
We saw large swathes of purple New Zealand burr, sedums, blue and white star creepers, scotch moss, thymes and more. There were some less common ground covers, too, like Mazus and several Erodium, which are tiny, miniature geraniums that spread into a tight mat instead of clumping. (They are very “stepable,” I noticed…) And there were a few little plants in there that I was not familiar with and didn’t get around to asking about. I’m sure I could find them on the website, where there is a list of this season’s Stepables, with photos and detailed information on the landscape uses of each plant.
I must admit, seeing a 4-inch square of a plant in the shop is totally different from seeing it two or three years on when it’s had time to spread:
The Stepables website has some useful tools for selecting the right ground cover for your space. It’s fun to toy around with it and see what you come up with for a difficult spot in your garden – or just to look for what I think of as petticoat plantings underneath shrubs or other plants.
By Alba Conte on Saturday, June 27, 2009 at 10:04AM PDT
Interesting, Kate! This reinforced last weekend’s lesson perfecly! And it sticks better when I read it! Everything looks so luxurious in context. Makes me want to cover half my yard! Thank you for this!
By kate on Sunday, July 05, 2009 at 01:58PM PDT
oops, sorry for the delay in response – my reply didn’t register the first time, apparently… Loree, I know what you mean about Corsican mint – I’m glad I’m not the only one rolling around on it and sniffing… And Alba, I think every garden Gnome needs some soft, cushiony ground covers to relax on!
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