Using miniture heathers in forrest plantings?

I am planning a forest planting to simulate a mountain top(4,000 ft)here in north Georgia. I was wanting to use some miniature heathers. Has anyone had any experience using these as ground cover in a bonsai planting?

of course your biggest concern would be how deeply invasive the roots are, along with how much sun & fertilizer they can tolerate vs what your main tree material needs...

why not get some and try an experimental planting and see how they do...

i for one would be curious, but its the wrong time of year up here for me to try it...

Thanks, I have taken your advice and planted some in a pot with bonsai soil. I never thought about how aggressive the roots would be-they were pretty root bound when I took them out of their nursery pot. We'll see in a year.

cool... i look forward to the follow up

but if they were root bound in a nursery pot, then i imagine they are not what i would call surface rooters...
sounds like the roots will be pervasive... but we'll see !

but if they were root bound in a nursery pot, then i imagine they are not what i would call surface rooters...
sounds like the roots will be pervasive... but we'll see !

In which case you treat it as you would a forest planting and trim the roots as a whole, cutting 2-3 wedges out of it in different places every year.

I use Cotoneaster for this purpose and they have very aggressive roots.  Just means you work on root more often.

(The roots probably are sufficiently different that you can tell them apart, anyway.)

so jim, when you do that, do you just cut into the soil and then replace the soil, or do you pluck 'em out, trim 'em and replant 'em ?

I cut out a ring of pie-shaped wedges all around the planting, put a layer on the bottom of the pot, plop the planting back in and fill th wedges with new soil.  Next year (or year after) new wedges in different places.  Pretty standard -- especially w/ azalea.

yeah... i am using that technique on some of my seriously root bound nursery finds, along with other material...
but i was just wondering more about the ground cover root pruning...