Dividing your plants is a great way to garden more frugally

One of the more charming oddities of gardening is that the more you do it, the fewer plants you have to buy. Some of the most proficient, experienced and, well, elderly gardeners I know will proudly exclaim that they can’t remember the last time they bought a plant – yet their gardens look fantastic.

It’s a twisted logic that novice growers struggle to understand and less-new-ones aspire to. Buying new plants, especially snazzy, in-bloom, ready-to-roll numbers from the garden centre, is a habit many of us shrug off after a few years. Once things get established, there’s a kind of challenge to garden as frugally as possible.

Lifting and dividing plants is a big part of this. After a certain period – two or three years for some perennials, half that for others – plants get large enough to cut into chunks and grow each chunk (or division) on as a separate plant elsewhere in your plot.

Not only do you get new plants for nothing, you get new plants that you know thrive in your soil and are of the same variety that already exists there. Another sometimes hard-to-swallow horticultural truth is that gardens look better when they have a smaller plant palette on repetition than when they include one of everything. Dividing plants helps that along massively.

It’s important to do this when plants are not actively growing. For plants that have flowered in the summer, the following spring is a good time, especially if the previous autumn was wet, because the plants will be about ready to put on a growth spurt. Autumn also works, as many plants are cruising towards dormancy.

Whenever you do it, make sure you allow enough time to plant your divisions after making them; letting them hang around and dry out makes it difficult for them to grow on well.

It is easy work, if physical and messy. If you’re inclined towards an immaculate lawn I’d suggest laying a ground sheet. Take a trowel or a spade, depending on the size of the plant you are uprooting, and carefully loosen the soil around the crown, giving some allowance for the root ball. If your plant is in a container – and has been for some time – you may need to throw some heft behind it. Try to get beneath the root ball to lever it out of the ground, then put on the ground.

If you have two forks, placing them back to back through the crown of the plant, or through the rootball as it lies on its side, is the traditional way. Some are more stubborn than others: I’ve taken a pruning saw to certain ferns without any lasting damage. Digging a hole for the new plant before you divide can help with a swift transition, and don’t forget to water it in well.