Moving self seeded plants

If you like me grow herbaceous plants amongst your roses, there comes a time with the self seeders that you need to take action and move them. Sometimes they grow at the base of the rose and this isn’t a good thing. It reduces the new growth the roses put on at the base throughout the growing season. It also looks messy and spoils the view you can get of both plants!

There are two ways of thinking about these self seeded plants. The first being that any plant growing in the wrong place is a weed or secondly, is that it’s a plant that can be used elsewhere in the garden.

This is my preferred method. Establishing them isn’t that easy, I prefer to lift them and replant into a space in the border or somewhere else. Here’s a rough guide to moving them

Here is an Aquilegia that’s self seeded it’s self at the base of a rose
You have to be very careful to lift them from the base of plants not to damage the main plants roots themselves. Sometimes it maybe better to lose the self seeded plant rather than damage the main plant itself
A nice clear base to the rose
Now this Aquilegia has now room to flourish and grow on its own right
I tend to plant them using puddling method I described on my blog last week
Now to the next one!

5 Comments Add yours

  1. tonytomeo says:

    So much of what we plant into the landscape came from somewhere else. We try to do it in autumn, so the new plants get soaked in by the rain. We sometimes need to can items that we have no use for, and hope that we find a use for them later. There are several European white birches out there now that got canned just because the new landscape that they are going into was not ready for them at the time. Now that it is so late, they can not be planted until next autumn, or will need to be irrigated if planted sooner.

  2. I’ve had a bumper year for hollyhocks self seeding. Now spreaded around the back of the borders.

    1. thomashort says:

      Lovely to see plants spreading about isn’t, always like to think of these self seeding plants to have the freedom to do what they want to do as long as it’s in the right place

      1. They seem to have gradually drifted along the borders to spots their happy.

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