Driveway crack garden

My concrete driveway is about 40 years old. Since my yard slopes down from the front to the back, the driveway does too, except for the area behind the house that is level. What happens when you put large slabs of concrete onto a hill and expect them to stay flat and in one place? Gravity laughs at you and starts moving those slabs ever so slowly. Eventually you end up with gaps between the squares -- on my driveway they are about 2 inches (5 cm) wide.

Every year these catch all sorts of seeds not only from the birdfeeders, but also from the plants in my yard in general. Every spring I start out keeping these cracks free of greenery, but by the middle of summer I've got a grid of plants that I need to deal with.

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This year it's been a little worse than normal since there are so many potted plants "temporarily" on the driveway, making it more difficult to see many of the crack plants. Since I'm planning on pulling them all out today, I thought I'd survey them first.

Surprisingly and disappointingly, there are no sunflowers growing this year. I guess the squirrels and chipmunks were more diligent than in previous years.

There is crabgrass and other grassy weeds:

There's pokeweed, which usually gets 6-7 feet (2m) tall, but in the confined area of the crack is less than a foot tall:

This is an attractive plant that I believe is a Datura:

I won't know until it flowers, but I had a potted Datura back here last summer and I know some of the seeds were scattered. (If you're wondering about the mulch in that photo, this is the spot that I unload mulch and compost from my truck, and I haven't swept it all up yet. Mulch is essential for most of the plants in my garden, but I don't purposefully mulch the plants in the driveway cracks. I'm not that mulch crazy!)

There are a few tiny Rudbeckia (Black-eyed Susan) around:

That's the nice thing about the plants growing in the cracks: they stay much smaller than normal. It's like bonsai for the lazy gardener!


The "winner" this year is what I'm pretty sure is millet. It's the stuff that looks a lot like corn stalks:

There are ornamental millet varieties around, but I've never grown them -- I don't particularly like them. Good thing I have a whole row of them growing now, right?

Some plants that I do like are growing here too, like this Salvia coccinea (scarlet sage):

I've got a few different varieties of this species growing in the yard, and this one with the dark calyxes is my favorite:

Beautiful! I love these.

Here's one of the "regular" ones with green calyxes nestled in with the millet:

There's some mint struggling but surviving in a crack too:

And some plants I can't identify but start out looking like something I may want to keep around, but then turn out to be unattractive or just another weed species:

This is actually quite attractive for a weed.

Mainly though there's millet:

As I said already I'll be pulling these out today -- if I keep saying it I will make it happen, right?

I should clarify: I'll be pulling most of these out, but will probably leave a few of them in place. The Rudbeckia and Salvia will probably stay. The possibly-Datura will stay too, as I want to see it bloom.

Although I don't have photos, I've also seen growing in the cracks this year: Agastache, tomatoes, hyacinth bean and cypress vines. These are all great plants that are welcome in my garden.

So you see, you don't even need a large yard or planting beds with well-prepared soil to grow an interesting garden. All you need is a few cracks in the pavement that contain an inch or two of soil, and the plants will grow!

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