What other element of the American garden has so little variety? In some parts of the Philadelphia region, you'll find entire front lawns covered in a winglike weave of ivy, pachysandra, or vinca.
Not at Chris Espinosa's house. A fine arts graduate of Rutgers University, he makes a living as an animator and graphic designer. He's got an artist's eye, in other words, and it shows in his plant choices, including ground covers.
In the backyard of his Cherry Hill tract home, on a patch of ground about 25 feet by 50 feet, Espinosa has planted hardy bananas and bamboo. He has built a hot tub, a pool with a deck, and a pond with, no kidding, a sandy beach.
For ground covers, Espinosa likes drought-tolerant sedums, such as Sedum rupestre 'Angelina,' which comes up bright green in spring, with a jaunty yellow flower in summer. "The way it spreads, you accidentally step on it and a piece goes flying, it lands and roots," Espinosa says. "I'm, like, wow! That's really neat."
He also has 'Catlin's Giant,' a purple-bronze ajuga, which some shy away from for its aggressive spread, and he's thinking of planting a rosemary ground cover around the hot tub. "I thought that would be kind of cool, to reach down from the tub to grab something and get rosemary," Espinosa muses.
There's a cool grab, all right; so's a cold beer, for that matter. But there's no reason rosemary, or thyme or creeping oregano, or any number of other herbs, couldn't be used this way, according to Barbara W. Ellis, author of Covering Ground: Unexpected Ideas for Landscaping With Colorful, Low-Maintenance Ground Covers, from Storey Press.
"Unfortunately, I think for many gardeners, a ground cover is a plant you throw down because you don't know what to do with the site," she says.
