If there’s one thing I hate doing in the garden, it’s staking plants. I love planting and sowing, don’t mind pulling out the occasional weed and love watching things grow, but staking… it annoys me to no end.
I think the reason I hate doing it so much is that I think it’s unfair to have to do it. Standing upright is a plant’s job, isn’t it? It’s written in black and white on its job description. Why should I do it for them?
In nature, no one (nor any demigod, gnome or other) spikes bamboo stalks into the ground next to plants with weak stems, or secures them to the support with his old nylon stockings. If the plant can’t stand upright, it crashes to the ground and dies, that’s all. Nature has no mercy on limp stems. So why are so many garden plants unable to stand on their own roots?
Hydriders’ Responsibility
Since we have to put the blame on someone, I blame the hybridizers of new plants. In their quest for the most perfect, beautiful and colorful flower, they forget the practical side of cultivation. They do it almost on purpose, constantly increasing the size of the flowers and the number of petals without improving the rigidity of the stems. I’ve never weighed a peony flower, but I’m convinced that a fully double peony weighs much more than a single one. And when those dozens of extra petals get waterlogged after a good rain, it must be a lot worse. But a single peony, as nature created it, never crashes. Have you ever seen a double peony, no doubt the fruit of the labor of a hybridizer with shares in a stake manufacturing company, capable of standing upright?
Yes, I want pretty flowers, but as a laidback gardener, I also want plants that respect themselves and me. A plant that crashes in the slightest wind is no longer a plant, it’s a green rag. I suggest we return all plants that crash to their hybridizer, just as we return a badly sewn shirt to the tailor. Why should we have to pay for a manufacturing defect?
A Stake With That?
But we pay for it, and we pay dearly. There are now whole genera of plants (peonies, delphiniums, gladioli, etc.) that you can hardly buy any more without the cashier at the nursery smiling and asking, “A stake with that?”.
It would be so much simpler if we could at least leave the stake in place from one year to the next, at least as long as the weak-stemmed plant survives. But we can’t! Etiquette dictates that they be removed in autumn. I wonder why? It’s not as if people come to visit our gardens in winter!
So much for decorum! I only have one stake in my flowerbed (a peony support I put around a recalcitrant sage) and it stays there permanently, year after year. I wonder why I even tolerate this plant when the rule in nature is “stand or die!”
A Few Tips to Avoid Staking
I admit to using a few tricks to avoid having to stake. Firstly, I avoid tall plants with double flowers like the plague, as they’re almost guaranteed to fall over one morning. Then I place any tall plants that tend to lean behind sturdier plants, such as shrubs. If the plant has a weakness, it can’t go far! For plants like delphinium that refuse to comply, I choose low, single-flowered varieties or pile branches at their base in spring. This way, as they emerge from the ground, their stems are well supported when the fateful moment of flowering arrives. If, despite everything, I find a plant crushed to the ground, I take this as a sign from God, telling me that it was destined to end its life in a vase.
The Unfinished Business of Hybridizers
I still maintain that all this could be avoided if the hybridizers did their job properly. It’s as if they were delivering an unfinished work and demanding payment anyway. I’m all for paying, but when the work is finished, not before. Hybridizers, go back to your brushes: I’ve had too many collapsing plants in the past, and I don’t want any more.
On the other hand, there’s at least one good side to flabby plants… they provide work for stake manufacturers, who are constantly introducing new variants of this loathsome tool in shapes as bizarre as they are ineffective. What they don’t understand is that the real problem isn’t how to secure the plant to the stake (they’ve come up with some good solutions for that!), but how to get the stake to stand up straight when it’s carrying so much weight. Just driving it into the ground is clearly not enough. I suggest they go back to square one. As a real laidback gardener, what I want from a stake is an invisible, unattached support that grows with the plant and then disappears… in fact, a kind of external backbone that I don’t have to worry about. And I think only a hybridizer can provide that.
Larry Hodgson published thousands of articles and 65 books over the course of his career, in both French and English. His son, Mathieu, has made it his mission to make his father’s writings accessible to the public. This text was originally published in Fleurs, plantes et jardins in June 1999.
I love your attitude and sense of humor. Every time I stake a plant from now on I will think of you! Ps however, I’m not ready to give up the bad habit yet.
Every year when 3 gorgeous Sarah Bernhardt peonies are in full bloom, like clockwork, a rain and windstorm knocks them down. And they are staked. Every year I wonder if I should just replace them.