Growth Habit

Growth habit is what a plant does with space over time. It is the difference between a shrub that stays a tidy mound for fifteen years and one that quietly becomes eight feet wide and swallows the walk.

The mistake almost everybody makes is buying by the pot. A plant arrives at eighteen inches across and gets planted three feet from the next one, because at eighteen inches across that looks about right. Five years later they are grown into each other, the air stops moving between them, and somebody is cutting out every third plant and living with the holes.

Here are the habits we sort by, and what each one commits you to.

Clumping
Grows in tight, dense clusters that hold their shape instead of running. Clumping plants stay where they are put, which makes them predictable in a bed and slow to need dividing.
Deciduous
Drops its leaves in fall and regrows them in spring. Deciduous plants give you seasonal change and winter light, and their bare structure is part of what a planting looks like for five months here.
Evergreen
Holds its foliage year-round. Evergreens carry the structure of a planting through winter, which matters more at this elevation than where snow cover is brief and March is green again.
Groundcover
Grows low and spreads wide, covering soil rather than standing above it. Used to suppress weeds, hold soil on a slope, and fill the places where turf is impractical to mow or water.
Spreading
Widens outward over time, often well past its original footprint. Spreading plants fill large areas economically, and they have to be spaced for what they become rather than what comes off the truck.
Vining
Climbs or trails rather than standing on its own. How a vine attaches — twining, tendrils, clinging or scrambling — decides what the support has to be, and that is a decision made before planting.

The honest version of all of this is uncomfortable to sell and worth saying anyway: a new bed spaced correctly looks sparse, and a new bed that looks full is overplanted. Year one looks thin. Year three looks right. Year five is what the design was drawn for. Almost every crowded, tired planting we are asked to fix was full and satisfying on the day it went in.

Habit also sets the limits on what pruning can do. You can shape a plant within its habit — a little tighter, a little more open — but you cannot make a spreading plant upright or a lanky plant dense. Shearing something into a form it does not want produces a plant that is bare inside, thin at the base, and needs shearing again every eight weeks forever.

And habit tells you what a plant needs from you structurally. A vining plant needs something to hold, and how it climbs decides what that has to be — a twiner wraps around a post, a tendril climber needs wire or lattice thin enough to grab, a clinger attaches directly to a wall and will hold on to mortar, and a scrambler does not climb at all and simply leans until you tie it in.

Of everything in a plant selection, habit is the hardest part to undo. Water can be adjusted, soil can be improved, a bad pruning cut grows out in a season. A shrub planted three feet off a walk when it wanted six is something a person lives with or pays to fix. If you are laying out a bed and want a second opinion on spacing before anything goes in the ground, that is a short conversation and a cheap one.

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