Arum maculatum advice
HollyB
Posts: 7
Hello everyone, hope the spring finds you all well! I'm excited to get back out into the garden properly again.
I have four Arum maculatum in my garden, which in itself is fine as I like the way they look and they're native woodland appropriate. The only hitch is that they're in my lawn and worse still positioned in a near-perfect horizontal line. They're very inconvenient here because they interfere with my lawn mowing and their linear arrangement frankly looks absurd.
I know a lot of people hate them but as I say, I think they're otherwise quite pleasant so I'd like to move them elsewhere. I have two questions about this:
1. I've heard that they are very hard to move because they're so invasive - does anyone have any tips for me about how best to shift them, and the best time of year for doing so?
2. I have another problem area of the garden that I've got my eye on for their eventual home. It's directly underneath an ash tree which itself is against a north-facing fence, and there's also a slope. This combination makes it really difficult to grow anything there (including grass and mint, I've found). My hope is that the shade tolerance and the invasiveness of the cuckoo pint might work in my favour in this location and provide some interest to a difficult area. Am I barking up the wrong ash tree on this one? Anything I need to be aware of?
Thanks so much for any advice!
Posts
Dig them out (the stems will almost certainly break) until you find the small knobbly corms. Replant the corms where you want them. They will survive but may not appear until next year. They will almost certainly still come up in your lawn again, but just keep pulling them up and mowing them and they'll eventually give up. They are extremly shade tolerant. The only thing they may not like is very dry soil so if that's the case in (2) then dig a deep hole, fill it with compost and plant into that.
Excellent, thank you - the area doesn't ever seem to me to get really dry, and the slope isn't so extreme that run-off would be a major problem. I'm not the one planted there though, so perhaps I'm not the best judge, and I'll give them a bit of compost as you suggest.
It's good to know that there will be plenty left in the lawn even if I don't succeed the first time...!