Review: Groundcover Revolution

I’ve never been very fond of grass, preferring flower borders to lawn. Yet, as a quick way of covering ground and giving a foil to planting they are ideal, or are they? In Groundcover Revolution, Kathy Jentz argues that there are better methods to use and, when it comes to difficult sites, grass shouldn’t be the first option.

She isn’t, she tells us, anti-lawn, recognising that there are times when it’s the only solution – as somewhere for children to play, for example. What concerns her is the “pervasive overuse” of what is essentially a monoculture, that needs constant attention to look good. When you add in the use of fertilisers, weedkillers and lawnmowers, grass isn’t very ‘green’.

(I was given a copy in return for a fair review.)

The book is based on her own experience taking on a house where the sunniest spot in the garden was a sloping patch of grass.

“The first time I tried to mow the sunny slope with a reel push mower, I nearly collapsed from heat stroke,” she tells us.

Deciding she wanted something more interesting, Kathy, who publishes and edits the Washington Gardener Magazine, replaced the grass with trees, shrubs and perennials and discovered “the miracle of groundcovers”.

With careful choice, you can plant up those tricky areas – under trees, on challenging slopes, damp corners – with plants that will look good and help to smother weeds.

Groundcover Revolution outlines the things she has learned, from which plants to choose to how to maintain a groundcover patch.

There’s advice on maintenance, a discussion on what’s meant by invasive and aggressive (two different things), an explanation of a tapestry lawn, and the observation that there is “no such thing as deer-proof” when it comes to plants.

Wanting to keep the book to a manageable – and readable – size, she’s limited herself to around 40 suggested plants, all “tough workhorses that survive my ‘set it and forget it’ method.”

Each plant appears in a ‘checklist’ chart and also has a more detailed entry with pictures, a description, cultivation notes, suggestions of particularly good varieties and an interesting fact – Quaker Ladies (Houstonia caerulea) was said to have been a cure for freckles.

The style is chatty and easy to read – I loved the simple classification of ‘yes’, ‘somewhat’ and ‘no’ when it came to sun tolerance, flowering and other characteristics of the plants suggested.

That said, the book is aimed primarily at the American market and some suggestions, such as prickly pear, are unlikely to fare well in a British garden. It also underlines the importance of Latin plant names as the common names that are also listed where mainly unknown to me.

Kathy says that the most frequent question she gets is for “what I call the ‘unicorn’ – the perfect groundcover.” There may not be any unicorns in the book but there are plenty of ideas to consider.

Groundcover Revolution by Kathy Jentz is published by Cools Springs Press with an RRP of £18.99. You can buy it here for £17.47. (If you buy via this link, I receive a small commission. The price you pay is not affected.) Alternatively, you may wish to buy from an independent bookseller here. All prices correct at time of publication of this post.

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