Caging the blooms

For some years now, Brian and I have been trying to put together a nice-looking flowerbed in our front yard. Our first attempt, using a wildflower seed mix, started out looking great but turned into a big mess as the tallest flowers, the bachelor's buttons, flopped over in a storm. Then we tried a mix of perennials only, but that yielded even more disappointing results. Finally we decided to give up on seeds and fill the space with an arrangement of a few larger plants, carefully chosen to provide three-season blooms: hellebore, coreopsis, echinacea, yarrow, and sedum.

Unfortunately, this just opened up a whole new can of worms. First the flowers got munched by groundhogs, requiring us to resort to chemical warfare in the form of homemade pepper spray on the plants. Then deer went after them, leading us to install an invisible deer fence to keep them out (even though it also made it quite a bit harder for us to get in when we needed to weed or cut flowers). And after that, we discovered that the taller flowers, such as the echinacea, were having the same problem as the bachelor's buttons: once they got to a certain height, they wouldn't stand up straight.

We knew from past experience that a grid of stakes and string was unlikely to fix this problem, so we figured we'd need sturdier cages around the problem plants. On the other hand, we didn't want to make them so big and clunky that they'd draw the eye away from the flowers. So, as a compromise, we picked up $17 roll of chicken wire from Home Depot that we could form into cylinders around each plant. 

Using wire shears, Brian cut lengths of this mesh to the size needed for each cage. For the echinacea and coreopsis flowers, he used three-foot lengths to make narrow cylinders that we hope will hold the flowers more or less erect. He also cut some longer four-foot lengths to make wider cages for the big sedum plants, hoping that they would discourage the groundhogs from munching on them so he wouldn't have to spray them every week. To make the cages sturdier, he doubled the thickness by bending each sheet of mesh in half lengthwise, using a line of wire conveniently strung along the length of the mesh as a guide. Then he bent each length into a circle and folded the snipped ends of the wires over to hold it in place. 

We set these circles around the plants and pinned them down with landscaping staples, which we happened to have some of left over after tacking down the ground cloth on the slope where we planted our honeyberries. We didn't have quite enough, but Brian rummaged through the mulch on that slope until he found an extra staple he could pull out and reuse.

And here they are: five little cages for two sedum, two echinacea, and one coreopsis plant. There's one other echinacea that's still protected under a full-cover cage after being munched nearly to the ground by deer last year, and there are two more coreopsis plants that got completely obliterated and will need to be replaced. These plants will eventually need cages of their own once they get big enough, but we have plenty of wire left for that.

Visually, I think these cages work pretty well. You can make them out in the photo, but that's mainly because the plants inside haven't grown very big yet; once there's plenty of foliage in there, I think they'll more or less disappear into the background. But it remains to be seen how well they will protect the taller flowers from flopping and the shorter ones from the teeth of hungry critters. Watch this space for updates.