Email a Friend
RSS
digg it
Printer Friendly
Mobile Alerts
Sphere IT
Save This PageFran Crumpler's affinity for container gardening prompted her son to ask her last winter if she was growing terra-cotta pots in the backyard.
"I have found that you can plant anything in a container," Crumpler said.
And she does.
Crumpler has more than 200 hostas in pots behind her house in the Meadowdale area of Chesterfield County. She also pots day lilies, herbs, hydrangeas -- even a dwarf Japanese red maple.
Hostas, however, are her passion. Like most hostaphiles, Crumpler can reel off the names of many of her plants -- June, Sagae, Frances Williams, Sugar and Cream. She purchased her first hosta 25 years ago. "The next thing you know, you have 200 of them," she said, laughing.
But the rock-hard soil and the expanding roots of large trees in her yard were cramping her hostas' growth. Voles, small mouse-like critters, were starting to kill off Sum and Substance, one of Crumpler's favorite hosta varieties. And the plants were being trampled as her two Australian Shepherds romped through the yard.
Several years ago, she decided it was time to dig up the shade-loving perennials and put them in containers.
Her strategy?
"You cannot believe how they thrive" out of the hard clay, she said. Some have reached 5 feet in diameter.
Her husband, Edwin, no longer has to worry about mowing the backyard. Crumpler "naturalized it," as she says, with 5 tons of pea gravel as a bed for her cache of pots and five birdbaths. "I wash a lot of bird poop off hosta leaves," she said.
Crumpler's terra-cotta garden is growing. She has purchased 35 plants this year. "You can never have enough hostas," she said.
Apparently not.
Contact Julie Young at (804) 649-6732 or jyoung@timesdispatch.com.
