Vernal pool plants

12 years ago

Hello, I have lived in my house for a little over a year, so I've only had one spring and summer so far. My land is on the border of wetlands. Last summer I had a pool of water in the back yard that was there from July until about September. The pool disappeared in the fall but the ground was still saturated. I wasn't able to mow my lawn in that area for 3 months. A large section of my grass died because of the pool and one of my pine trees also started dying (turning brown)Ã¯Â¿Â½ so I think it might have been a first-time occurrence because the grass was really nice back there. Although, two of the pines had fallen before I moved in.
Anyway, to get to the point, Is there anything I can plant in that area to replace the grass? If I get the pool again this year, the grass will continue to look awful. Last year when all the grass died I did gets some weird plants, like one with little purple flowersÃ¯Â¿Â½ But I'd like to try to plant with some kind of semi-aquatic plants or somethingÃ¯Â¿Â½ so it could look nicer like a garden rather than dead grass with plants that look like weeds.
Anyone have any suggestions? Thanks!

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Comments (3)

chas045
12 years ago
I have posted about my 'Sweet Flag' a couple of times. It grows in my stream and the sides of my pond. It may be divided into tons of plants. I got a pot of it at a pond store originally. The pot was sitting in several inches of water at the time but it does fine in just damp conditions. I am not sure how well it would handle CT conditions. I am in North Carolina. We got down to 7 degree F a couple days this year (unusually low for us) and certainly the pond/stream plants are doing well and the land plantings are not dead; and not always being damp, don't do that well anyway.

Sweet Flag is a clumping long narrow leaved plant about a foot high.
orangeaugust
Original Author
12 years ago
Thank you! I looked up images of it on Google and I think I have some of that back there. I had a few plants like that shoot up from around the pool and they did last even after the pool dried up. I guess it might look nice if I planted a whole bunch back there... that's a lot of work. Are there any other plants you'd suggest, like anything that would spread out on its own?
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chas045
12 years ago
I don't have any experience with spreading aquatic plants but I suspect others will have a few ideas. But back to sweet flag for a moment. The hardest problem with it is digging a big clump up. It becomes large and well dug in. However, in a muddy environment I would think it would come up without too much trouble. From that point, it is easy to soak it in a puddle and then yank perhaps a hundred plants apart in a few minutes. At that point, you could take another minute to sling hand-fulls of plants into all shallow directions and you are done. No rooting necessary; in shallow water, the plants will take care of that.