Now you KNOW I love New England asters. I feature them prominently in photos showing off my garden. I tout them as native plants that require no fussing at all, even in periods of drought. But this year’s superdrought taught me to ask one more questions about a plant’s (supposed) tolerance for drought. To wit: Will it not only survive but actually look good?
See, after devoting a huge chunk of prime garden real estate to asters all season long and waiting, waiting, waiting for the big pay-off, this is what I got – a scattering of blossoms in a sea of diseased-looking foliage. My hort friends tell m
e the drought is the cause, so I have a decision to make: either water them more regularly get rid of them altogether. Or, at the very least, devote less space to asters and finding some mid-summer bloomers to include in this prime spot instead. You know how gardeners love an excuse to acquire more plants? I’m looking through catalogs already.
Bottom photo: what I expected them to look like.
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Is it fair to give up on something after one bad season? I usually give a perennial more than a year to see if it works for me. Some of my asters were less than exciting this year, but that’s atypical, so they’ll still be there next fall (along w/the mums that everyone but me seems to hate).
We had a ‘moderate drought’ in my area and my asters underperformed but then so did a lot of other plants in the garden. I’d leave the asters and see what happens next year.
I started gardening, I mean thoughtfully gardening, just this past spring. In May or June, while poking around and weeding in an old flower bed, I found a plant that looked like a weed but something told me to move it from behind the overgrown rosemary and see if turned into anything. I put it in a flower pot and it sat on the deck all summer. I watered it daily and for the entire summer it looked perky but still distinctly weed-like. In Sept I noticed tiny little pre-buds so I planted it in a real flower bed with lots of sun. Finally, in October it bloomed. An aster! It was lovely. For about 2 weeks. That’s a long time to wait for 2 weeks of bloom, but I’m gonna keep mine.
HOnestly, even if the asters had had a good year, I was devoting too much space to them, getting bored with them, and wanting more to happen in that border.
BUt don’t worry about them; most of them are already planted in my neighbors’ gardens, and I have plenty left. And all winter to decide what to plant there, having given myself permission to spend a few bucks on my garden. It’s hard being cheap.
Susan… I know what you mean about “too many asters”. I will confess in the spring I’m usually weeding out all kinds of aster seedlings. And I just looked at all my asters with seed heads galore. Looks like I’ll be doing a lot of weeding in the spring.
Good for you to give yourself permission to spend some money on your garden!
Leave the asters! They will have better years in future, and, when interplanted with the larger boltonias and the solidagos and the russian sage the effect is unmatched in the fall garden – I depend on them for fall color…and this year, due to the drought, I gave them just a little bit of water about every two weeks or so in late July and in August to help them through and they put on a nice show this year even though it was dry…