A few more words about how to garden

Over on GardenRant I offered my succinct 39 Words on how to garden in the summer and thought I was done with the subject.  But then I remembered HACKING BACK, one of my favorite activities in the garden.  If you’re not familiar with the notion then I bet you haven’t read Tracy DiSabato-Aust’s best-selling Well-Tended Perennial Garden.  No problem; I’m sure they’ll just keep printing the thing until we all have one - and learn to grow healthier and better-looking perennials.

Here’s how it works.  The asters in the foreground of this photo, if left to their own devices, would grow tall enough to be flopping failures as plants; let’s face it.  So I do just what Tracy tells me to do - I hack ‘em back to half their height twice, once in May and once in mid-June.  So they’ll bloom a tad later but they’ll never flop on me.

Just behind the asters you see the Echinacea purpurea or purple coneflower just starting to bloom, which I’d hacked back once in May. Tracy says you can either do what I did, hacking back early, or cut off about a foot of the plant while in bud in early July, noting they’ll "recover and flower nicely from mid-August until early October."  Well, in my copy of her book I wrote the decisive marginalia "NO" next to that point, so don’t say I didn’t warn you.  Just goes to show once again that even the smartest of experts can’t predict exactly how plants will behave  in our own gardens.