On 23 Mar 06 at 13:25, Jim McKenney wrote: > ...It does take card of itself, and seeds around unobtrusively. Here in Victoria, Chionodoxa something-or-other is a no uncommon feral plant growing in patches by the road where conditions are right. And in the garden it is something of a thug simply because it seeds so prolificly and spreads everywhere. Scilla bifolia is similar in its habits, but less anxious for lebensraum. Under the right conditions a Victoria garden becomes sprinkled with blue dots during the early spring. This is entrancing, but there's a better way of dealing with these charming thuglets. One problem in many plant collectors' gardens is that the visual appearance is of the dog's breakfast style: one each of a gazillion different plants. Myself, I've gradually become dissatisfied with this approach and over the years have (philosophically if not in practice) come to the p.o.v. that overall appearance *is* important and that the real challenge is to weave a collection of rarities and oddities into something that looks good on a large scale. I've stumbled across several ways of approaching the ideal implicit in my remarks above. * use the same plant repeatedly in different parts of the garden to bind it together as a whole. I've done this with witchhazels; there's one border with seven or eight different cultivars, then another three or four spotted elsewhere to echo that main planting. * plant largish groups of those few plants you really like and which you know how to propagate. I have a bed of Jeffersonia dubia, somewhere around ten plants. Usually you only see one plant of this. As a group, even if they don't exact overwhelm the viewer with a sense of transcendental ecstasy, they at least don't get lost in the shuffle. * group scattered plants of the same sept into one area so they make a real show. And this brings me to chionodoxa, scilla bifolia, and any other little blue self-sowing blubs. My garden was sprinkled with these and all they did was annoy me because they kept turning up *everywhere*. Some ten or fifteen years ago, I started a concentration camp for them next to a parking area, and as I found them in flower, lifted them and moved them to their new site. It took a few years to round them up, but the result was a bed about 25' long and of indeterminate depth, in an area where nothing else would grow and where you wouldn't want to risk anything of any real value. If a car backs up over that bed, it doesn't matter! If I pile leaves on it in the fall, it doesn't matter. Yet when that bed is in flower, as it is now, it's a stunner, a big, bold sweep of bright blue. Far better than the sprinkled approach imho (in my humble opinion). It's mostly chionodoxa, but there are some scilla bifolias in it. I won't pretend that I don't have any stray little blue self-sowers. There are still a few and no matter how sedulously I round them up, a few more appear the next year. It doesn't matter; like a dog's fleas, my stray little blue self-sowers take my mind off more depressing issues (in the case of the dog, that he's a dog) and keep me off the streets and out of trouble as I run around trying once again to dig them all up. Best of all, I've converted a fairly common garden situation into something out of the ordinary. It's a method I recommend for anything that tends to scatter itself about your garden. -- Rodger Whitlock Victoria, British Columbia, Canada Maritime Zone 8, a cool Mediterranean climate on beautiful Vancouver Island