Spacing: Plants Grow, Who Knew
This is the lesson I wish somebody had sat me down and taught before I put in my first bed, because I learned it the expensive way and I still cringe thinking about it.
Here's what happened. My very first bed, I bought a bunch of one-gallon plants (small pots, which is right, that part I'd figured out) and set them in the ground looking at how tiny they were in their little nursery pots. They looked lonely. So I scooted them closer together. Looked better that way, more filled in, more finished.
Two years later I had a jungle. Couldn't tell one plant from the next, half of them choking each other out, and I ended up on my knees with a shovel digging plants back up that I'd just paid good money to put in. That was a lesson. Plants grow. Who knew.
The thing nobody tells you at the nursery
That little penstemon in the one-gallon pot is maybe eight inches across right now. Give it two growing seasons and it might be two feet across. A rabbitbrush starts out looking like a twig and ends up a small shrub, three or four feet each way. Nothing on the plant tag screams this at you. You have to go looking for the mature width, and even then people don't believe it, because the gap between plants looks so silly and empty on planting day.
That gap is not a mistake. That gap is the plan.
How to space them
Before you dig a single hole, do this. Set the pots down on the bed, still in their containers, roughly where you think they'll go. Don't plant anything yet. Just place them.
Then look up the mature width for each one (nursery tag, or ask whoever's selling it, or look it up before you go) and pace out that distance from the center of one plant to the center of the next. If a penstemon's going to be 18 inches across at maturity and its neighbor's going to be 18 inches across, you want roughly 18 inches between their centers, maybe a little less if you want them to touch and knit together, maybe more if you want mulch or rock showing between them, which I like for a drier look anyway.
It will look wrong. It will look like a yard with the chicken pox, little plants scattered around with a lot of bare dirt and mulch between them. That's correct. That's what a properly spaced bed looks like on day one. It fills in. Give it that first year, maybe into the second, and it stops looking like polka dots and starts looking like a bed.
Where I still get this wrong
I don't have the design eye, I've said that before, Marian's the one who can look at a bed and see how it should flow. What I can do is math and patience, so that's what I lean on. When I'm not sure, I go wider than I think I need to. It's a lot easier to add a plant into a gap in year three than to dig one out of a tangle in year two.
And this matters more here than in a regular garden bed: our plants that "belong here," the natives and the tough adapted stuff, often spread wider than a comparable water-hungry ornamental would, because they're built to cover ground and outcompete weeds without much help from you. That's a feature. Let them do it. Don't fight it by cramming things in.
My son, and the panic that wasn't
My son Travis put in his own xeriscape bed at his place down in Lehi after he saw mine, and he did the spacing right, actually, better than I did my first time. But about three weeks in he called me, a little worked up, saying everything looked stunted and sad and spaced way too far apart and was it dying.
It wasn't dying. Native plants sulk their first year, they put their energy into roots you can't see instead of leaves you can, and they just sit there looking unimpressive while all the real work happens underground. I told him give it till August. He called two more times that first month anyway. By July it had filled in enough that he stopped worrying, and now it's one of the better beds I've seen anybody put in around here.
So if your bed looks sparse and a little sad in May, that's not a spacing failure, that's just the first year. The spacing failure is the one you don't notice until year two, when everything's tangled and you're the guy on his knees with a shovel.
Before next time: grab the plant list you've been building and jot down the mature width for each one next to it. Nothing else, just that. We'll use it.