During a time of isolation, shop your own garden

Few things are more invigorating for a gardener than a trip to a local garden center in the colder days of spring. It’s too early to buy annual flowers, but just a stroll through a warm and humid greenhouse to look at row after row of growing plants starts the gardening wheels turning.

I’m missing those trips to warm greenhouses these days, but I’m finding solace in shopping my own garden. Dividing perennials is not high on my list of priorities most years, but it probably should be. There’s no better way to get more plants than to divide what you have.

Plants growing in your garden are already acclimated to the conditions, and many benefit from occasional division. If you notice a perennial growing in a doughnut shape, it’s probably time to dig it up and divide it, tossing the dead center and using the new growth on the edges to create new plants.

Irises are famous for this type of growth and for being very unhappy when they are crowded. They are the original social distancers. Siberian irises, in particular, are prone to the doughnut effect, and spring is a great time to divide them up as they emerge. You’re better off waiting until late summer to divide beared irises, however.

Hostas sometimes lose their center or it becomes so old and woody that it has little value. I like to dig up the entire plant if possible, then take deep breath and thrust a sharp spade cleanly through it to separate it into chunks. Dividing hostas is not delicate work.

Some plants seem perfectly happy without dividing, but you’re better off doing it anyway.

The poster child for this in my garden is the Asian woodland poppy Hylomecon japonica, which erupts in a low cloud of golden flowers in early May. I first learned about the plant in a blog post by author and former Martha Stewart Living garden editor Margaret Roach, who gardens in a similar climate in upstate New York. In Margaret’s garden it creates gilded carpet under trees just beginning to leaf out.

Although I buy whatever I can from local garden centers, more unusual plants, and in particular plants that only look great for a short amount of time, are not typically stocked. And so it was with Hylomecon japonica, which required a fairly extensive internet search to find at a specialist nursery.

It grew happily for a few years, but after a couple years of nice growth it seemed to be stuck at the same size. Last year after it finished blooming I cut the original plant into four fairly small pieces and spread them out in the same area. I’m delighted to report that all are coming up and each plant is much larger than the chunk I planted last year.

I’ll allow those plants to grow this year, but I’ll likely divide them again next year. I can already picture that carpet of spring gold.