Common heather: planting a plant
A multicolored herb carpet with an intoxicating scent is an ordinary heather. The plant has taken root in summer cottages and garden plots. Beautiful, unpretentious, it pleases the eye with flowering from the first March to the last November days.
Description of common heather
The sprigs of honey heather are easy to recognize. They are sprinkled with racemose inflorescences consisting of tiny cupped flowers. The color of the flowers is varied. Pink, white, lilac, crimson, lilac thickets of creeping shrubs resemble generous strokes of artistic paint.
Common heather resembles an elastic multi-colored carpet
A graceful heather stem grows to a height of 40 to 70 cm. It seems vulnerable, thin, but has incredible vital resources.
- The common heather plant tolerates frost well.
- Does not shed leaves for the winter, rolling them up in a tube.
- Flowers from the stem do not fall off after flowering. They firmly hold in their places, without changing color, until deep snow.
The decorative properties of heather have made it popular with gardeners and landscape designers. Heather’s melliferous flowers are used by traditional healers for the preparation of decoctions and ointments.
The plant reproduces in the wild is very simple: crumbling dry seeds and broken off fragments of branches germinate on their own. Heather can be specially bred in different ways: by cuttings, dividing the mother bush, growing seedlings. To get unpretentious bushes on your site, the easiest way is to buy plants prepared for planting.
Choose a suitable place for a young plant: dry, sunny, not blown by cold northerly winds. In the wild, heather grows in harsh conditions, but its decorative cousin requires some comfort. The shrub prefers peaty or sandy soils with an acidity of no more than 5,5 pH.
It is safer to plant in the spring, so that the roots of the bush have time to get stronger over the summer.
- Dig a planting hole 30 cm deep.If there are several bushes, make the distance between them at least 30 cm.
- Make a drainage layer of sand, gravel, pebbles.
- Prepare the ground by mixing it with sand, peat, bark.
- Sprinkle this substrate over the roots of the seedling.
- Water and mulch the soil.
Heather grows slowly, but requires annual pruning: it stimulates the growth of shoots and makes the stem decorative. It is rarely necessary to water the bush, and it is enough to feed it once a year, in May. For the winter, cover the heather with burlap, coniferous branches.
Unpretentious heather adorns suburban areas, has a strong aroma that attracts bees. The plant takes root easily and does not require careful maintenance.