Chicago’s magnificent Lurie Garden is a great advert for delaying your big chop
An admission: for a gardener professing to love the wilder, naturalistic look, I have difficulty restraining my inner neat-freak. When it comes to the annual cut-back of spent herbaceous stems – a task carried out between autumn and spring, depending on your preference – I have a propensity to rush for the secateurs. The idea of leaving so much garden maintenance to the last moment is often too unsettling. But over the years I have learned to be patient. With garden designers increasingly championing “four-season” planting schemes, an appreciation of winter seedheads – which are attractive, and an important resource for wildlife – has curbed my pre-Christmas tidy-ups: now I wait until February-March, when signs of new growth appear at the base of perennials, before chopping away dead stems.
A garden very much embracing this delayed cut-back is the Lurie in downtown Chicago, a three-acre plot at the south of the city’s Millennium Park and a masterpiece of year-round herbaceous planting. Its naturalistic scheme – which includes over 120 native prairie species – reconnects the city with the surrounding Midwestern grasslands and their dramatic seasonal flux. As in the wild, flower and grass stems are left standing right through to spring, before they are mown to ground level.
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