Tips to Find Free Perennial Garden Plants
Divide & Trade with Other Gardeners for Gardening on the Cheap!
May 19, 2008
Garden centers offer a huge variety of plants to choose from and books to help you design a beautiful botanical show of colors and textures for sun and shade, but the cost of creating a perfect garden showplace can be prohibitive. Here is how you can create the same sanctuary for very little cash.
Dividing Perennial Plants
Perennial plants are a great investment. They come back year after year, require very little maintenance, and every year, perennials typically become bigger and better. But if you have limited growing space in your yard, bigger is not necessarily better. You may eventually have to split some of your plants to keep them at a size that works for your space. This tendency of perennials to occasionally need downsizing can be exploited to help you build a virtually free and literally fantastic garden.
Using Your Own Perennials
Over several growing seasons you can split your own plants and use the extra stock to fill in other areas of your yard with more of that same variety. For example, it is very simple to slowly fill in a fence line with black-eyed susans, which both reseed and occasionally need dividing. Just a few plants spaced sparsely the first year can fill in, over the course of just a couple growing seasons, to become a solid wall of fall color that comes back year after year.
Trade with Neighbors
You may not want more of the same in your garden, and this is where it pays to make friends with your gardening neighbors. Other gardeners will also occasionally have plants that need dividing (and you’ll need something to do with the black-eyed susans that will soon be overpopulating your yard).
Let other gardeners in the neighborhood know which plants you may be dividing and giving away this growing season and ask them to share any extra perennials that they may have on hand. Many perennials spread aggressively, and gardeners are often happy to get the extras off their hands.
Join a Garden Club
Garden clubs are a great way to expand your collection of plants, particularly the rare and interesting varieties that serious gardeners are more likely to take on. These clubs meet regularly and exchange helpful information, sometimes organize trips to tour area gardens or state and national botanical gardens, and best of all, garden clubs frequently have plant swaps!
Gardening Knowledge on the Cheap
You really don’t need to purchase expensive tomes to increase your gardening expertise. Your local library may have dozens of gardening books and the internet is also an excellent free resource. Garden club members often share books and magazine subscriptions as well.
So, although you will not be able to create a spectacularly garden instantly by dividing and swapping plants, you will, over time, be able to achieve this goal with patience and a little effort. And isn’t this what gardening is all about?
More Gardening Information
For more gardening resources, see the following Suite101 articles: Grow from Seed of Seedling, Planting a Container Herb Garden, and Grow an Easy Vegetable Garden.
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