Thirty-Four Dollars

I think I have officially ruined garden centers for myself.

I spent about twenty dollars on two big mums, brought them home, and immediately stopped seeing them as two plants. The white one could be split. The burgundy one could be split. Once I actually got into the roots and started separating everything, my twenty dollars of flowers had turned into enough plant material to fill two large planters by the front door and still leave me with two perfectly good chunks of burgundy mum that needed somewhere to go. So I planted those too.

The funniest part is how little the whole thing actually cost. The two big planters were seven dollars each, so I had fourteen dollars in pots and about twenty dollars in mums. The tall ornamental grass in the middle of each planter came directly out of my yard, which means it cost me nothing except the realization that I have apparently been walking past free landscaping materials for years. Thirty-four dollars.

That is basically the entire front-door setup.

I split the mums between the two planters, added the grass from the yard for height, arranged everything until both sides looked balanced, and suddenly the front of the house looked like I had gone somewhere and bought two finished fall arrangements. Those things can get stupidly expensive when somebody else puts the plants together for you. Mine were fourteen dollars worth of pots, twenty dollars worth of mums, and whatever value we assign to me wandering around my own yard with a shovel looking for something tall.

Then there were still those two burgundy pieces.

I couldn't throw them away because they weren't scraps. They had roots, foliage and flowers. They were just smaller mums now. So I dug two more holes, planted them, moved the rocks back around them and somehow stretched the same twenty-dollar purchase into four different places around the house.

This is the part of gardening that has completely changed for me this year. I used to look at the price tag on a plant and decide whether that individual plant was worth that amount of money. Now I look at a plant and immediately start wondering how many plants I am actually buying.

A ten-dollar perennial that stays one ten-dollar perennial is fine. A ten-dollar perennial that I can divide into three plants this year and divide again later has completely different math. Once I learned what can be split, propagated, harvested or moved, landscaping stopped looking quite as expensive because I realized I don't have to buy every future plant individually. My yard is becoming part garden and part supply closet.

Those ornamental grasses by the front door are probably my favorite example. I didn't order them. I didn't drive anywhere for them. They were already growing twenty feet away from where I wanted them, and all I had to do was realize that I could use them somewhere else. There is something incredibly satisfying about making something look better using material that was already sitting on the property for free.

And the front door looks fucking good.

That's important because sometimes I get so interested in propagation, roots, divisions and what something might become next year that I forget the obvious reason people started gardening in the first place. You can take a pretty boring piece of your house, spend thirty-four dollars, dig around in your own yard for a while and completely change what you see when you come home.

The two extra mums are in the ground now. The planters are full. The grass was free. I am absolutely going to become insufferable about paying full price for landscaping.