Landscaping with mulch can be a fun, easy way to expand your landscape scheme, accent favorite plants, define different areas and reduce garden chores, all at once. The variety of mulch products and techniques is seemingly endless, but just as with your plants, your eye will help you pick out the right one for you. Mulch is great for using under shade trees where grass won’t grow, defining areas for play or entertaining, and accenting planting beds and birdbaths.
The most common mulch product is wood bark or shredded wood product. In this group, the readily available products shredded cypress, pine bark, color dyed shredded hardwood, and pine straw. Shredded cypress has a pleasant light wood color, and could highlight an otherwise shady area. As a natural product, it is easy on the eyes and goes with most any landscape. Shredded wood products do tend to have a rugged, sort of untidy look to them, which would make them less appropriate for an extremely manicured planting area. Cypress is extremely moisture resistant, and does not break down nearly as fast as bark or hardwood mulches, making it a little less labor-intensive. Finely shredded mulch is soft underfoot, and a good choice for children’s play areas, but will also break down faster.
Pine bark is a wonderful mulch with an almost geometric texture to the roughly square pieces. It looks more sculpted than shredded bark, and the neutral darker color easily blends in with most all plants and will visually soften bright areas. The main drawback with pine bark is that it is very lightweight, and if used in an area where runoff water moves or puddles, it will simply float as far as the water will move it. It does break down after a year or two, and will add a bit of acid to the soil, and so is great for azaleas and not so great for keeping your hydrangeas pink. This mulch is useful for homes with modern lines or modular styling.
Many of the dyed products come in colors of local sports teams. A straightforward and simple use would be to select a color or color scheme you like, preferably one that complements your house color, and arrange the mulch in a circle or oval around an individual tree, or perhaps around the mailbox. An avid sports fan may want to form a logo of their team in mulch. A slightly more advanced use may include color mulching an area where the plants leaves or flowers contrast the mulch color, such as orange mulch around purple petunias, Homestead verbenas, or pincushion flower. The color of the mulch lasts for a year or more.
Pine straw, or pine needles, give a fine textured appearance, they intertwine and stay put, and they resist breaking down for several years. They are sometimes available in a dyed or reddish color. They do add some acid to the soil when they break down, but the rate is greatly slower than with bark. Pine needle mulch is used effectively in very large coverage areas, with or without plants. It looks especially complementary with fine leaved plants like Japanese maples, those with sword-shaped leaves such as iris, and as a natural accent in any color scheme.
The major drawback to using hardwood or pine mulch products is that they quickly break down to nourish the soil, so they need to be reapplied yearly. The cypress last longer, as does pine straw. For best effect, the ground to be mulched should be weed-free to start with; many gardeners apply about 6 layers of newspaper to the ground and then the mulch on top of it. It can be placed on top of weed block fabric, also. After the first year of breakdown, the broken down mulch acts as potting soil, and any seeds that have been dropped or blown onto it have a good germination rate. The pine straw, applied at a depth of 4-6″, is the least likely of these products to promote seedling growth.
Alternatives to wood products are stone. Stone includes crushed gravel, marble, river rock, and lava rock. There are even manmade rocks, and rocks dyed for color. Here, your landscape palette expands naturally to include walkways and relaxation areas as well as conventional landscape mulching. Rock is available in many diameters, from very fine sand all they way up to decorative use of boulders. The texture may be smooth, as with river rock and pebbles, or rough like gravel. Popular uses for landscaping are for planting areas next to concrete drives and walks, as a water-resistant mulch around water features and lawn art, and in Zen gardens. Stone is best applied over a smooth, prepared area that is first covered with weed block fabric, and with a raised border to retain the rock in place. Concrete patio tiles or bricks set in a pattern of open squares (or other patterns) and filled in with rock can provide solid footing as well as decorative areas to highlight plants or place a barbecue or birdbath. Some of the squares can be filled with wood mulch or different colors of rock. Rock is a permanent alternative to wood mulches, does not require renewing, and does not support seed growth.
There are also exotic mulches, such as cocoa hulls (with their wonderful fragrance) and shredded rubber mulch. The cocoa hulls are difficult to find and quite expensive. The shredded rubber, which is made from the recycling of tires, may contain bits of wire from the ‘steel belts’, and is drawing concern from the organic community for possibly leaching small amounts of contaminants into the soil. However, these alternatives exist and may well suit your needs. The great thing about using much as part of your landscaping is that it can be changed in type, shape, and style, as much as you like!
