A Prairie Garden Journal    by Dick Meyer

Get those Perennials
out of your Garden

 June

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August

That’s right, perennials aren’t just for flower gardens, anymore.  Some perennials are also great plants for your landscape.   Certain perennials offer as much year around interest as shrubs, and are often much easier to grow successfully in Wyobraska landscapes, so my advice is--get those perennials out of your flower garden and into your landscape. 

Don’t get me wrong, some perennials are just flowers—they bloom for a month or so at some point through the spring, summer, or fall and then their foliage gets sort of ratty or unattractive.  These perennials are just flowers.  Other perennials can spread very aggressively and become a problem to keep under control.   Others never get large enough to show up as a “landscape” plant. 

But a number of perennials are attractive plants year around--often times offering more visual interest in the landscape throughout the year than comparable small or medium sized shrubs.  You may be surprised to learn that many perennials are much easier to grow in Wyobraska soils than are most of the more widely used small and medium sized shrubs.  This is particularly true of ornamental grasses and many of the large wildflower perennials native to the American prairies.   Perennials and ornamental grasses are oftentimes better fits, size wise, in the narrow beds now commonly found on the smaller residential lots which are being filled up with ever bigger homes.  And finally, perennials are often less expensive to buy and easier to plant than most shrubs, meaning that you can add color to your landscape and keep the green in your wallet.

If you are planning a completely new landscape bed, I suggest the one-third rule for ornamental plants in an average Wyobraska landscape—use one-third evergreen shrubs (for winter interest), one-third deciduous shrubs (look for large shrubs with spring-time blooming and good fall foliage color and small to medium shrubs that bloom in the summertime), and use one-third perennials and ornamental grasses.  This combination of plants (plus or minus a few fractions in each category) almost always produces landscapes with high visual appeal and year around interest.
 

If you are replacing some shrubs that have died or that are getting overgrown, it’s almost always possible to find one or a combination of perennials that will make a pleasing revision to an existing landscape bed.  

It is important to remember that not all perennials make good landscape perennials.  Here’s what makes a perennial a good landscape perennial:

1.  It has attractive foliage before and after it blooms. 

2.  It doesn’t spread or reseed too aggressively.

3.  It has a long (3-6 week) blooming period, and possibly re-blooms if deadheaded.

4.  It retains its stems and “structure” in the garden even into and through the winter. 

5.  It gets at least as big as a small shrub at some point in the growing season.

When this list of requirements is applied to the hundreds of varieties of perennials that are sold as garden plants, only 10 or 20 percent of perennials meet all of these tests of a good landscape perennial.  So be aware not all perennials work well as landscape plants—in fact, most are not good landscape plants, but in my experience it’s well worth the effort to find those “good” perennials and add them to your permanent landscape.

November

September

Previous Articles

May 04, 2006
Ornamental Grasses

April 27, 2006
Crazy Clematis

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