Start By Shopping Your Own Plants
Fall is a good time to work on your garden's design. PLUS, a Fall Plant Share event on Saturday, October 4, 2025.
Fall is the best time for planting trees, shrubs and perennials in South Carolina. They don’t have to contend with the relentless heat, and their roots get established for strong growth next spring.
By all means, visit a local nursery and get inspired, but before you do let me offer a suggestion…
Shop Your Own Plants
On cool mornings or evenings in September and October, I like to wander around my property looking for plants to multiply:
Those irises look crowded in that corner, and the border has holes. Dig up, divide, move around.
Some of those lilies repeated across the front bed would round out the design.
The hellebores have naturalized behind the camellias, where no one sees them. Let’s bring some into the woodland garden.
That fern is getting fried. Find a spot for him in a shadier spot.
There’s a redbud sapling behind the azaleas; let’s pot it up and give it a chance to thrive.
Anyone can do this: Share plants with yourself.
But it helps to have a few things in the back of your mind:
A basic understanding of some landscape design principles
For an aesthetically pleasing garden, you need MORE plants, but not necessarily more KINDS of plants. I once heard that English treasure of a man Monty Don say a garden doesn’t need more than 5-7 different kinds of plants, it just needs more of the ones it does have.
So if you have one or two of something planted somewhere, you can vastly improve the situation, generally, by adding 3-5 more of each. It’s going to look better.
Related, it helps to repeat plants across your line of sight. It makes different areas of your property feel connected, designed.
That’s a very simplistic primer. Read books. Watch videos. Look at sketches. It’s not hard to learn what works and why, and then you can decide when you want to break “rules.”
Recalling some sound principles while you’re walking about will help you find inspiration. (It also helps me reign in my creative impulses when I do go to the plant nursery.)A basic understanding of what to move in the fall and what to wait to move until spring
You can always Google it to be sure, but generally speaking, I will move trees, shrubs, perennials and bulbs in the fall.
I wait until spring for most grasses, partly because it’s just easier to manage. You can cut them back once you start seeing some new growth begin to emerge, dig up a less unwieldy plant, divide them and replant.
Now… on to the second thing: Gardeners share!
Share Plants with Your Neighbors
If you find yourself digging up more than you feel so inclined to replant, share them with a friend. It’s just what gardeners do. All of the irises on my property were shared with me. And the blue mistflower. And the fig tree. You get the idea.
If you’re local, let me invite you to come share plants at a free event in the Village of West Greenville on Saturday, October 4!
This is our fifth or sixth “Plant Share,” and we’d love to see you there. We used to call it a swap… but new gardeners seemed to get itchy accepting free plants when they didn’t bring any to contribute. (We want you to get over that, but we do understand. We changed the name.)
At our spring event, neighbors showed up with thornless blackberry plants, native flowers and trees, cactus, veggie starter plants, seed packets, and much more.
We’d love to see you there!