The ultimate ground cover?

One of the most popular posts I've ever done on this blog is this old one from 2011 on the topic of ground covers. It talked about the difficulty of finding a suitable ground cover for our front yard, which would need to have the following features:

• Able to grow in our climate (UDSA Zone 7)
• Able to grow in our heavy clay soil
• Tolerant of full afternoon sun, but not requiring full sun all day
• Low-maintenance
• Able to tolerate some light foot traffic
• Low-growing, so we would never have to mow it (this was crucial)
• Non-invasive

As it turned out, there weren't a lot of plants that ticked all those boxes. In fact, I'd been able to find only three: smooth rupturewort (Herniaria glabra), barren strawberry (Waldensteinia fragarioides), and Dutch white clover (Trifolium repens). Weighing the pros and cons of all three of these, I decided the clover was probably the most ecofrugal, and I had a go at planting some in the back yard, but sadly, it didn't thrive as we'd hoped it would. I went on to experiment with other ground covers, such as creeping thyme, but none of them really turned into the easy-care green carpet that I'd hoped for.

But now, eight years later, it looks like we may actually have found the ideal ground cover completely by accident. Or to be more accurate, it found us.

You see, we actually happened to have a little bit of barren strawberry growing in our back yard when we bought the place. And since it was nice and green and grew well with no effort on our part, we were happy to let it grow wherever it wanted. In fact, over the years, we've helped it along by pulling out the weeds (chiefly mugwort) that happened to be its primary competition. And by this spring, I discovered that the barren strawberry plants had more or less completely colonized one full corner of our back yard.

Just take a look at that lush blanket of green, growing thickly and evenly across the entire spread from the patio to the border of the honeyberry bed (and even climbing slightly up the wall). Left to its own devices, the barren strawberry did all this without any planting, feeding, or even watering on our part. It doesn't need mowing, but doesn't object to having the mower pushed over it in the parts of the yard that still have grass. It doesn't mind being walked across on a regular basis as we go to and from the clothesline. It has even managed to choke out most of the mugwort in that part of the yard, something I wasn't sure was possible.

Now, I know some folks consider this plant a weed. Even my gardening books describe it as aggressive (though since it's a native plant, it can't technically be considered invasive). But frankly, I think that aggressiveness (or shall we call it "assertiveness"?) is actually a benefit in our yard, allowing it to compete with all the other, much less agreeable weeds. As far as I'm concerned, with the exception of the garden and mulched beds, this stuff is welcome to grow anywhere on our property it likes. We'll even help it along, if we can figure out how.

One comment at Dave's Garden says it's "easily propagated by soft tip cuttings in water," so maybe I'll try clipping a piece or two and seeing if I can sprout some of these to spread to the front yard. If I can get it to spread there as exuberantly as it did in the back, in another nine years we might finally have the mower-free landscape we've always wanted out there.