A former neighbor had a fine lawn, azaleas
and other lovely shrubs and, at first glance, beautiful
perennials; at second glance, very long-lasting flowers, week
after week, year after year. Silk or plastic is one solution.
However most of us struggle with deer and voles, drought and
disease, to have color and fragrance and life in our gardens
year around by planting perennials, those species that last at
least two years.
Daylilies and Iris and Peonies are forever plants
even though each has a limited season. By choosing early,
midseason and late cultivars of these three you will have Iris
or Daylilies for six weeks and Peonies until rain or heat
shatters their beauty. A host of other perennials can be used to
bridge the seasons so that by reading the small print you can
have a garden for all seasons.
In their wonderful “Book of Lists”, Bonnie Lee
Appleton and Lois Trigg Chaplin have given the term “guerilla
perennials” to those plants that hustle along to maturity. In
our mobile population we sometimes move before the perennials we
have planted become established, since some species need three
or four years.
One of the ‘quick-to-cover’ shade perennials they
list is variegated bishop’s weed, Aegopodium podagraria. It can
be invasive but it is a ground cover and that is usually the
point of planting it in the first place. They also list for
shade creeping Jenny, Lysimachia, ostrich fern, Matteuccia, and
grape leaf anemone, Anemone vitafolia, and Ajuga. These are
plants you see everywhere and they are everywhere because they
have earned their popularity by surviving dependably! A caution:
another Lysimachia, L.clethroides, the gooseneck loosestrife, is
invasive. It prefers full sun and I have it in shade that gets
deeper each year but that plant expands into any empty spot it
finds. It is rather disarming when in late summer all the curved
necks are headed the same direction, as if they were on a
mission.
Equally familiar are the sun guerillas, yarrow,
calico aster, leadwort, sunflower, obedient plant, moss phlox,
and the loosestrife mentioned above. A good place for that might
be the so-called hell strip between road and sidewalk…or since
sidewalks are so rare, between any two parcels of pavement.
The only Artemisia on the sun list is ‘Powis
Castle’, about the only lovely silver/grey foliaged plant that
doesn’t mug out in the heat and humidity here. Somewhat slow to
get established but increasingly popular as more and more
hybrids enter the market is the Echinacea, the old-fashioned
coneflower. There are dozens of newly fashioned cultivars of the
native coneflower, with more promised. You can’t go wrong
planting the dependable natives. If you wish to feed the birds,
these natives are designed for that and they flourish in garden
or meadow, in sun and in well-drained but not rich soil.
A compact rose/red one is E. purpurea ‘Kim’s
Knee-High’ and a white flowered compact one is ‘Kim’s Mop Head’.
There is a vivid orange one, ‘Tiki Torch’ and even a green one,
‘Green Jewel’, that has lime green petals around a darker green
cone. Tradionally the petals of this favorite have been a rosy
red but two new ones have more brilliance, ‘Red Knee Hi’ and
‘Tomato Soup’.
Deep pink and fluffy is ‘Pink Double Delight’ and
‘Total Attraction’ has purple/pink flowers high above bright
green foliage on black stems and reputed to be unusually long
blooming. ‘Coconut Lime’ is as delicious as its name and
‘Harvest Moon’ has waxy yellow/gold petals. You see the
coneflowers are now a rainbow!
Coreopsis is another flower that has become more
sophisticated with all the attention showered on the original
tickseed. ‘Moonbeam’ is not new but has the softer yellow than
the gold of the species with fine textured wiry foliage.
Coreopsis tripteris is a tall, (seven foot) back-of-the-border
plant with the same characteristics as the low-growing
‘Moonbeam’. Not content with yellow, newer tickseeds are marked
with maroon or red, such as ‘Red-Shift’ and ‘Siena Sunset’. For
beauty summer after summer, select those perennials that have
natives in their ancestry. They will become the mainstays of
your garden.
A NOTE: Coming Sunday: Earth Hour! You are thinking, but isn’t
that in April? Earth Day is Wednesday, April 22 but this Sunday
evening is Earth Hour. Last year 36 million Americans and
millions of others world wide turned out their lights for 60
minutes. You may not have been aware of it unless you track the
internet but people, young people especially, are not waiting
for instructions from on high, but are demanding solutions to
the problems created by climate change. Check it out:
earthhourus.org.