The Best Groundcovers for Tennessee (so far)
The 'Grey Owl' cultivar of Juniperus virginiana (eastern redcedar) grows as a woody groundcover It seems to me that there are two basic ways to approach gardening - you can fight against Nature or you can try to form an alliance with Nature. When it comes to preventing your garden beds from getting overgrown by weeds, the fighting approach calls for annual (or more frequent) applications of mulch, plus annual (or more frequent) applications of herbicide. This fighting approach seems not only wasteful from an economic and resource standpoint, but also so much effort! And not one-time effort, but constant and unending work. The alliance approach calls for using some other plant - a groundcover - that can block and suppress the weeds for you while you sit back on your porch and drink a Mai Tai (or an iced tea, for those of the teetotaler persuasion). Of course, it's not quite as simple as all that. Sometimes you think you have an alliance with the groundcover...