Supporting Your Garden

At this juncture in the gardening season I’m as giddy as a kid in a candy shop. New and old plants are popping up everywhere, and with the right amount of warmth and rain the garden world is again reaching for the sky.

But in that reach many of our garden plants need a little help to keep them steady, sometimes keep them straight and to keep them from tangling or just flopping over. This is the time to help these plants and do some planning. They need our ingenuity, creativity and sense of aesthetics so that most of our efforts work, but do so unseen.

This is the world of staking and tying, and it is indeed a learned garden art.A good sign of an accomplished and or sophisticated gardener—and garden—is when we get to this point in the growing season and beyond and everything in the garden seems to be growing upright without visible signs of support. In a well-supported garden you’ll notice that the herbaceous and even some tree peonies, in spite of their heavy flowers, aren’t bent to the ground with their flowers turning to mush. You might notice now that the delphiniums are getting tall and stately without cracked and broken stems. The clematis seems to be growing and twining without any signs of visible support and yet the vines are getting longer and longer.

Even in the vegetable garden you’ll note that the peas are growing on some sort of structure that allows the tendrils to twine and the vines to get long and mature. Beans also, especially pole beans, will soon be growing in pyramids, along wires or strings that allow the plants to sprawl and become productive. Good support in the garden is both decorative and practical, and there are ways of getting this done that make it look magnificent and at times invisible, or it can be the result of poorly planned and sloppy efforts that accomplish little and even damage the plants.

I was so fortunate to have worked in a magnificent garden 30 years ago that was designed by Hitch Lyman. Hitch is an upstate artist and plantsman who studied landscape design and has the most incredible knowledge base of plant materials of just about any gardener I know. His passion and vocation is in the art of painting, but he survives by putting his passion for the garden to work.

One of the first things Hitch shared with me was the secret of gathering beech twigs in the winter. In many of the woods of Long Island and upstate, you can find beech trees that are less than 10 years old and still have plenty of branches close enough to the ground so you can cut a few here and there and not do any damage to the tree or its shape. We’d cut pieces the diameter of a pencil up to a half-inch in diameter and from 2 to 5 feet long. The great thing about these branches is that the color is somewhat garden neutral and when the cuttings are taken in late winter and stored in a cool outdoor location they remain strong yet pliable well into late spring.

When staking time comes in the garden, the branches are examined to match the right thickness and twig structure to each particular use. Some pruning can be done to make “y” joints to support plant stems, while dense twigging would be left in place to create a fan effect for supporting a plant that might have a floppy habit. The best example of this would be with a plant like Geranium Johnson’s Blue. This geranium can be magnificent in the garden, but it can also be very sloppy as it matures, and a heavy dew or light rain can make it look awful as it grows. But if you support the geranium’s structure just before flowering, a heavily twigged beech branch, set so only 12 to 15 inches is above ground, will simply disappear in the geranium foliage, leaving a plant that appears to be upright and floating in air.

For straighter garden supports where twigging isn’t necessary, we use the thinnings from the orchard pruning that we do in the winter. Each year we bundle up the 2- to 5-foot cuttings that we take from the apple orchard when we thin the fruit trees. These are stored in a cool outdoor spot, and come May and June we raid the bundles for naturally brown-colored stakes that are strong, upright and will last through the summer even when struck into wet garden soil.

This year we also made 3- to 5-foot trellises from these apple cuttings by taking a bundle of 3- to 5-foot-long straight twigs, and tying the bottom of the bundle. Then we open the bundle up at 8- to 10-inch intervals and tie a lateral branch across, making the tie at each intersection where the vertical meets the lateral. You can use jute, raffia or florist’s wire to make the connection ties. I’ve seen similar “natural” trellises in garden centers for $15 that are made in China. Home-made cost … about 25 cents, and it takes no more than 15 minutes to construct.

Let’s go back to the very beginning, though. When we talk about supporting plants there are really two issues that have to be considered. The first is the support itself, and then there’s the manner, method and material you use to attach your plant to the support.

Staking and support materials can be made of wood, metal, plastic, fiberglass and combinations of materials. The most common staking material is probably bamboo stakes, which are available as “natural” or dyed green. They begin in 2-foot lengths with a pencil diameter and go up to 6 feet and higher with half-inch diameters. Bamboo is relatively inexpensive, is sturdy for at least one or two gardening seasons, and works well in loose soils. On the downside, bamboo is relatively inflexible, and the ends split and fray easily.

A number of other stakes are available in different types of wood. You can buy half- to 1-inch-square wooden stakes made from hardwoods that can be up to 8 feet tall, and these will last several years. They are more expensive than bamboo, but much stronger. Even stronger and thicker are the “bark on” wooden stakes that can be up to 3 inches in diameter, have a very natural look and are used for heavy staking and even holding up deer fencing.

Fiberglass garden stakes may be an alternative to wood, but they don’t look great and you should handle them with gloves because you can get fiberglass splinters from them. Takiron is a metal stake clad in polyolefin resin that is supposed to imitate the look of green bamboo. The end is pointed to allow for better soil penetration and the top is tapered and rounded. These stakes are available in several diameters in lengths up to 8 feet, can last many years, and are fine for light-duty use, but we’ve found that since they are hollow and not solid it’s not uncommon to have them bend and break when you push them into hard ground or when there’s a good wind while heavy plants are attached. There is a solid metal stake that’s available that is much more sturdy, but these are more expensive and heavier.

There are also numerous other ways to stake plants, from cages to hoops, canes, pyramids, natural and synthetic nettings and more. Some of the larger garden centers carry entire lines of staking materials which they will have on display. Be careful at discount stores, though, as here you’ll find inexpensive staking material but quite often the colors seem to come from someone who has never laid eyes on a green stem or brown twig and they can look ghastly in the garden.

Next week, my fantasy stake and how to tie a plant without killing it while keeping your ties and stakes invisible. Keep growing.