This Is How You Can Keep Your Martha’s Vineyard Landscape Looking Fresh
“If you’re sitting in a place like Martha’s Vineyard, I don’t think you’re going to write a song about a ski resort.” — Adam Schlesinger
You know what makes Martha’s Vineyard so special and beautiful? Its exquisite landscape. Home to some of the most delightful native plants, trees, and flowers, Martha’s Vineyard is a botanical paradise.
While Martha’s Vineyard is frequently visited for its many pristine beaches and state-of-the-art properties, one cannot deny the fact the natural surroundings and beauty of the island make it all the more lovable and attractive.
Regardless of the season or the weather, the landscape on Martha’s Vineyard remains overwhelmingly gorgeous, diverse, and rich.
Tips on How to Revive and Maintain the Landscape on Martha’s Vineyard
When it comes to Martha’s Vineyard landscaping, it’s important to understand what grows best in the region, given its coastal climate, sea breeze, it’s native fauna, and the quality of the land’s soil.
Maintaining the landscape on Martha’s Vineyard requires work, meticulous effort, regular supervision, and timely alterations to best fit the needs of the land and of everything that grows on it.
Here are some tips on how you can keep your Martha’s Vineyard landscaping looking fresh.
1. Know Which Flowers to Grow
Thanks to its vast open spaces and abundant lush nature, Martha’s Vineyard is home to wild animals like deer and turkeys that are free to roam the island. Often enough, deer and turkey come around the gardens and feed on your flowers, plants, and shrubs. So, before you plant anything, make sure you pick plants that deer and turkeys don’t particularly enjoy eating.
Pick from a variety of perennials and annual flowers and plants such as Bleeding Heart, Lambs’ Ear, Snapdragons, Beauty Bush, Daphnes, and Spirea. These plants are nothing short of spectacular, easy to grow, and an absolute treat to the eyes.
2. Plant Small
People visiting Martha’s Vineyard tend to like walking around, hiking, trekking, and even riding their bikes to take in the scenery. So consider trimming your landscaping carefully and colorfully to make sure the plants growing around the area are short and small.
Plant Allium Millenium to lend a long-lasting ornamental finish to your landscaping.
For that perfect and sweet spring-to-winter landscape, plant viola labradorica, or alpine violet, to add a stunning purple hue across Martha’s Vineyard landscaping.
3. Grow Seaside-Friendly Plants
Given the fact that Martha’s Vineyard is an island and the area is surrounded by ocean waters, the air will always carry some salt vapors and humidity. If you want to keep your Martha’s Vineyard landscaping fresh and full of life, grow shrubs and flowers that grow the best on island soil.
For example, Hydrangea macrophylla, popularly known as bigleaf hydrangea, dons the biggest and prettiest blue flowers. This shrub takes to the salty air well while also enjoying the coastal winter temperatures.
4. Do Some Weeding
Weeds are heavy pollinators, and thanks to the sea breeze on Martha’s Vineyard, the landscape can easily get populated by unwanted weeds. Weeds can attack your lawns and eat away at your grass. They take up so much water to grow that nothing’s left for your grass to thrive on. Use your hands or a weeding tool to remove weeds before they start seeding the soil.
Prevent weeds from invading your landscape throughout the year.
5. Fertilize Smartly
Use organic fertilizers combined with natural compost to get the best results. A double dressing of fertilizer will help keep your lawns fresh and thatch-free. It also boosts the quality of the soil, enhances the soil texture, and helps accelerate the growth of roots while also increasing the surface area for the roots to spread.
While Native plants have evolved to adapt to the soil, non-native plants need certain fertilizers for better growth and sustainability. Make sure you fertilize your plants in spring.
6. Do Some Pruning
Pruning is like trimming your plants. You don’t want to overdo it though. Prune your plants, shrubs, and trees just slightly every winter to help them grow better.
You also don’t want to chop off the low-hanging branches of trees and large shrubs just before summer. These branches lend much-needed shade to the roots of these trees during the hot and dry months. Make sure you prune only twenty-five percent of the plant in one sitting.
The Flora on Martha’s Vineyard
If you look up online for information on the landscaping of Martha’s Vineyard, you are bound to come across the Polly Hill Arboretum. Built by Polly Hill in 1958, this stunning arboretum is a hallmark of beauty, elegance, charm, and sophistication at Martha’s Vineyard.
The epitome of grace and natural wonder, the landscape of this part of Martha’s Vineyard flaunts a plethora of rare, native trees and vibrant shrubs nestled between tastefully laid-out stone walls across lush green meadows.
Find the prettiest and most unique flowers here including rhododendrons, magnolias, conifers, camellias, crabapples, hollies, and so many more.
Embellished with intriguing native trees such as bear oak, dwarf chinkapin oak, and white oak, the natural landscape of Martha’s Vineyard is evergreen, colorful, and an echo of the island’s captivating attributes.
