Ground Cover Plants For Sunny Areas

Abundant Blooms with Ground Cover Plants For Sunny Areas.

Remember I told you about my Ice Plant Ground Cover and how I was hoping I’d have a carpet of pink this spring?  It’s looking fabulous amongst all the other ground cover plants for sunny areas that I planted on my street side bed. All these sun loving plants provide drought resistant ground cover for most of the year and the ones that die down spring back to life around mid March.

I have some blue Forget Me Nots cosying up to a clump of Erigeron at the edge of the bed. As I’ve said in the past, Erigeron will grow in both sun and shade and needs no care whatsoever. So will Forget Me Nots but they are strictly spring bloomers, reseeding themselves happily and reappearing the following spring. Actually, I planted this entire bed to withstand the drought conditions that we are suffering in California and they are all doing well. I have not had to water them since the very sparse winter rains a couple of months ago.

I’ve planted it in the style of spring wild flowers in the Western Cape except that my abundance of yellow and orange will come from California poppies as opposed to Namaqualand daisies. A friend of mine said that this bed reminds her of a high desert spring garden so I guess the two areas must have similar conditions. The thing is, most of the ground covers in this bed, besides the Ice Plant,  keep on blooming all summer long and some of them continue into late fall, a wonderful mixture of perennials and annuals.

Gazanias

I planted lots of Gazanias last spring and they all started blooming again a week or so ago. I love their boldly striped petals and their wide open stance in the middle of the day. They are perfect ground cover plants for sunny areas, as are Arctosis which get even bigger but have very similar flowers with more solid colors. The Arctosis in my back garden did not like the frost, but the Gazanias in this bed just looked a little tatty for the rest of the winter.

Geraniums have seeded themselves all over the bed and have produced a profusion of tiny little purple flowers. They are spreading all over the other plants but I’ll let them be until they start to seed and then pull them out. I’ll leave a couple behind to set seed for next year. I also have what I think is a form of Allium popping up. I think it’s very pretty but others consider it a weed. I think I’ll keep it.

 Echeverias

When we moved in there were masses of little Echeverias, lots of which had been hit by the frost and I thought they wouldn’t recover. But I took off the black ones and replanted the others and they all bloomed beautifully last year, throwing up delicate pink stems with dainty yellow flowers on top so I’m waiting for them to do the same later in the season. Being succulents, these lovely little ground cover plants for sunny areas are a great addition to the bed. They also do well with some shade so are very versatile as long as they’re not over watered.

A fellow gardener gave me a present of yellow Bulbinella which I planted to the side of the bed, and it’s already flowering and flourishing. I love having it around because it really is great for burns and insect bites, as well as being lovely and bright.

So that is the base of my water-wise, street side bed, a host of luxurious ground cover plants for sunny areas vying with each other for their place in the light. I have other plants flowering, like the delicate Knoffia in the corner which I grew from a cast off stem from a garden near by, and Day Lilies nestled in amongst the Osteospermum, just putting out their maroon and yellow blooms, and others which are yet to flower, like Agapanthus, Lavender and Pelargoniums. They’ll all add magic to the mix.

Happy gardening and please don’t forget your sunscreen. There’s so much skin cancer about, you must protect your skin.

By the way, here is a link to a list of gopher resistant plants: http://www.groundcoversandgardening.com/gopher resistant plants.

If you want to buy plants that deer probably won’t eat, look here.

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