Know your plants, so you can give them customized care. By Tony P. Wrenn

Date published: 10/7/2006

"WINTERIZE" MAY BE a word dreamed up by auto repair shops to convince car owners to get their vehicles ready for winter and, in so doing, put a bit of extra money into the mechanics' pockets, but it is a useful word. Almost anything can be winterized, and the garden is no exception.

Winterizing the garden is nothing like winterizing the family car, however, for most of the work of garden winterizing can be done by the gardener, at home. Still, a little help from friends is always welcome, just as long as they check with the gardener before beginning work. It helps, if one is to work in the garden, to know what is planted where.

Lilies, easy to destroy, lurk here and there, though there may be little or no foliage above ground to indicate their presence. Slicing them into pieces with a gardening tool does them no good, and uprooting them, unsliced, requires replanting, which is not toil one needs, considering all the other work waiting.

Daffodils, tulips, ornamental onions and other bulbs lie just below the soil surface, hidden and vulnerable to destruction when one is working above them. Naked ladies, which tend to produce massive bulb clumps in a fairly short period of time, are easily disturbed, and cutting through one of those, depending on the place and seriousness of the wound, probably means the lady will not recover.

Other plants, such as Virginia bluebells, whose above-ground foliage disappears shortly after they blossom in the spring, can be easily dispatched unless one is paying attention to where they grow. Bluebells spread and form mats that welcome spring as few other plants can, yet if one tries to plant over them one courts disaster. Clearing away weedy overgrowth and putting down a layer of mulch is about all one can do to their beds, but they need that.

There is no better time to pile on the mulch than now. As long as one uses material that will not mat and freeze, mulch will act both as a source of organic material and as a blanket. It is difficult to determine which is the more important. Pine needles, straw or hay free of seed, pine bark and fines, oak leaves or ground leaves all make fine mulch. Mounded around the exposed tubers of iris, clumps of daylilies or the bases of hellebores and other plants that show growth above ground, mulch applied now will not only help the plant, but look good as well. NOTE: Though identified as a protea, the plant in the illustration that appeared with last week's column was actually a plumeria or frangipani.

Date published: 10/7/2006