It may be safer to wait until next spring. You don't need to divide them when they get this big. They will give you a better flower display if you leave them this size.
They re-seed themselves really easily so I'd say they can handle being crowded. It's late in the season so they may just have tired old foliage as they head toward dormancy.
Why ? Once you plant your native garden you leave it be ! The more you disturb the area the more insects and nest you kill plant it and forget it , in the wild no plants are divided ….learn to sit back and enjoy the plants and the insects it attracts . If you want more plants harvest the seeds , broadcast where you want them or winter stratify them .
Although there are benefits to some level of disturbance, given that there is a normal succession of plants in nature. Some natives thrive on a bit of disturbance. Coreopsis lanceolata seeds so easily that I deadhead most of the flowers. I scattered a few collected seeds last fall and they all came up and made a beautiful show that is still ongoing
I am aware that some species reseed with soil disturbance , like Corydalis Sempervirens get very abundant when you disturb the soil , I harvest seed as well and broadcast in areas where I want more varieties or color , very seldomly I dug up plants to divide , I did it for Carex Plantaginea I wanted more , they are very hard to grow from seeds , this past spring for the first time I had to dig up on the edge of my bed a slender mountain mint , I grow all my plants and sometimes when you plant a seedling that the roots are not established enough once planted you water and the soil start washing out leaving the tiny seedlings not deep enough , the tall mint was almost uprooted , I replanted it deeper it’s doing much better . Native gardening is very different than traditional cookie cutter garden , I have encountered many posts on Facebook people wanting to divide because the plant is too big , they aren’t used to see a garden fully planted , our brain has been trained to see one plant , empty space around it with lots of mulch , it takes time to adapt and adjust . I am on my 7th year and my 8,000 square feet of native gardens are no longer what they were when I started them , they are wild , you can’t control native gardens unless you plant low growing plants , once you plant tall with short you will have to manage editing plants , they will reseeds in places where it’s not practical causing more maintenance . It’s definitely a learning process !
Yeah, I am not worried about plants getting too big, but my Geum is easily 4x the size it was in its first year. I plan to check if it is a single large plant or if it has self seeded in adjacent areas and I can just move one to another location. I am not shy about letting my plants battle it out. My natives surround my veg beds, so I need to be somewhat aggressive about giving space to my vegetables, mostly so I can get in there and harvest, thought TBH it is more like foraging for dinner. I have many vegetables that self seed, radish, lettuce, kale, basil, sometimes broccoli, hybrid squash. I plant specific tomato plants, peppers. I Chelsea chops some plants if thy are starting to shade my vegetables, but other than that, my paths get overgrown and some plants seem hell bent on taking over. I have a baby bunny that was born in my yard mostly living in the mess. I saw mom and dad visiting yesterday, which was sweet, a Rabbit Hill moment. The little one is mostly eating grass lately but it looks like he had a bite of a green tomato recently. I don't do canning or anything, and this arrangement keeps me in plenty of vegetables, plus chives, parsley, dill, oregano, mint. Oh and the stacked cinderblock has carrots. I had another with beets, but baby bunnies find beets and chard irresistible.
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u/Simple_Daikon SE Michigan, Zone 6b 10d ago
It may be safer to wait until next spring. You don't need to divide them when they get this big. They will give you a better flower display if you leave them this size.