By Mike Isbell
University of Georgia
OK, so how is it pronounced?
Everyone putting in the landscape plantings at the new middle
school had seen it all their lives. But none of us knew for sure
how to pronounce it.
We were talking about liriope, one of many plants used as ground
covers.
Linda, Janie and I pronounced it LIR-e-OPE, LIR-uh-pee and
sometimes lir-e-OPE-ee. It didn’t make any difference to Rob and
George how you pronounced it. But Jim and Jerry both pronounced
it la-RYE-uh-pee.
“Jim is from Iowa,” I jokingly reminded everyone. “So we
shouldn’t pay any attention to him.”
The “L” word
We finally just agreed to refer to it as “the L word.”
To save on the cost of the plants, Janie had dug several
bucketfuls of the ground cover from her yard. We spaced it every
12 inches in the planting bed in front of the Chinese fringe
tree, clethras, Japanese autumn ferns and Siberian irises.
“Where do you want these trees planted?” someone asked. And since
it was toward the end of the day, the answer was, “Who cares?
Just put ’em in the ground.”
By the time we got around to planting the liriope, we were all
dead tired, so joking about the correct way to pronounce
something helped take our minds off our labor and our aching
backs.
Now, if you don’t like physical labor, don’t volunteer to spend a
beautiful Saturday installing a landscape at a school. But if you
like volunteer work, spending a day with some wonderful people
can be rewarding.
Spring fever creeping up
I realize it’s not quite spring, but spring fever may be creeping
up on you. If you have the urge to plant something and it happens
to be shrubbery, some careful planning can save you a lot of work
down the road.
How? Simple. Plant low-maintenance plants.
Plants come in all shapes and
sizes, so select the plant that has the same shape as the space
where you’ll use it. Avoid using fast-growing shrubs — they may
get too big too quick and may look like a big, green, growing
blob.
Know how far apart to plant the
shrubs. They’ll be much easier to maintain and won’t look crowded
when they get bigger.
Avoid tight angles in bed lines
where it will be hard to mow the grass. And the less grass you
have to mow (in my opinion) the better. Use ground covers — yes,
like liriope. Even if you can’t pronounce it.
By the way, the accepted textbook pronunciation is la-RYE-uh-pee.
