This particular section of our garden, shown in the accompanying photograph, has proved the most persistently satisfactory.
Originally, we called it the Thyme Ramp, or simply the Ramp, because it was begun on a straight strip of ground rising slowly between a level lawn and the drywall at the bottom of the rock garden.
It has since bent around to the right and is extending along another side of the lawn, so it now has roughly the shape of a boomerang.
Here, we thought, we needed a special sort of planting, a transition zone between the more or less civilized and suburban-looking lawn and the rock garden proper with its atmosphere of studied wilderness.
The situation called for something almost as quiet as groomed turf, almost as low but already imparting a note of the untamed uplands after which the rock garden aspires.
Thymus Serpyllum
A lengthy list of low ground covers was compiled, and after every species that was disqualified for one reason or another was struck off, nothing remained but Thymus serpyllum. So, Thymus serpyllum, it had to be.
Only later do we learn from one of Lawrence D. Hills’ books that this sort of thing is fairly common in England and called a Thyme Lawn. Since then, we have adopted the English term.
From two plants on the rock garden slope, which manifested their totalitarian leanings, I made a few hundred cuttings, which was as easy as propagating a weed. They were of two different varieties.
One we had bought under the label of Thymus serpyllum coccineus, but which is more likely T. serpyllum ruber, with red flowers and slightly coppery foliage.
The other is probably the common type with pale lilac blossoms and soft green leaves.
Establishing a Thyme Lawn
The establishing of the thyme lawn proved considerably more troublesome than making a few hundred cuttings. For one thing, I made the mistake of planting out the cuttings as soon as they were rooted.
This resulted in considerable losses. The ground was the sheerest stony clay subsoil left exposed after the bulldozer did preliminary clearing and grading.
A first attempt to improve the soil with a green manure crop had failed lamentably because a woodchuck (Marmota monax to the zoologically minded) grazed off the buckwheat I had chosen for the purpose as fast as it sprouted when the thyme cuttings did so poorly.
I tried working in pulverized limestone sand and manure, which seemed to encourage the weeds more than the tiny thyme plants.
Chickweed, pigweed, lambs quarters, white clover, crabgrass, weedy sedges, wood sorrel, and some dreadful veronicas had to be fought for two years with the earnest of terror and at least assiduously for two more years to keep them from throttling the thyme.
Overcoming Weed Problems
Gradually, however, we developed a fairly efficient method of combating the weeds and improving the ground simultaneously.
Every week, we piled the lawn clippings on the patches of soil not yet covered by the thyme and on adjacent weed-stocked stretches over which we wanted to extend the thyme carpet.
Then, as soon as the weeds were killed under the smothering and rotting mulch, more plants of Thymus serpyllum (fairly large ones now) were set out and kept watered until established.
Thyme Frontier
Thus, the fight was finally won. The gaps within the earliest planting closed, and the thyme frontier advanced while the wild weeds retreated three years ago.
We, for the first time, beheld what we had visualized from the beginning: in June, solid sheets of soothing lilac in a random pattern.
In July, a similar casual pattern of deep pink all over the “ramp.” The sight of this heath-like flowering carpet is delightful (my wife uses the word enchanting).
It lasts for a month or longer. When the bloom is past, the lawn mower, with the rotary blade set 3” inches high, is run over the planting to remove the faded spikes, and the lawn grows fresh.
Qualities of Thyme Lawn
This green carpet is one of the great assets. Never is there any monotony in it. Never that coat of paint effect of an ordinary lawn, never that crew-cut smoothness.
Compared with the machine-made turf, the thyme lawn always bears the stamp of a hand-crafted article or spontaneous growth, though more labor went into it than into almost any lawn. Its surface is always subtly billowing, and the two greens of the two varieties blend admirably.
Even amid a snowless winter, when ordinary lawns are as brown as dead sole leather, the thyme lawn maintains an intriguing play of subdued living color. At any season, and to our constant surprise, it almost unfailingly evokes comments from visitors.
Closing The Gaps
In the beginning, when there were still many gaps in the planting, we had thought of filling them in with other varieties of Thymus serpyllum than the two we had started with.
But somehow, we never got around to that, and when the gaps finally closed and we witnessed the first bloom spread unbroken by bare patches of brown mulch, we knew that greater color variety would have been a mistake.
It might be appropriate and effective in different circumstances, but for our purposes, the two flowering periods, each kept to a single color, and the two subtly differing greens completely fulfill our early expectations.
44659 by J. P. Zollinger