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Seeing
Red
in your
Landscape
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To my eye, there’s just nothing quite as pretty as a
perennial bed with a full rainbow of colors.
Unfortunately that rainbow of colors in a Wyobraska
perennial or landscape bed has been about as hard to
find as an actual rainbow over a dusty western
prairie. Don’t get me wrong, there have always
been plenty of perennial flowers and summer blooming
shrubs that like to grow in Wyobraska landscapes.
But one important color has always been missing, or
at least hard to find—red.
One of the reasons that red is such an important
color in a landscape is that red and green are
complementary colors. With green being the dominant
color in a summer landscape, all that green makes
the red look more ‘red’. But perhaps even more
important, the color red also makes all of the green
in a summertime landscape look more “green”
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But a few years ago red arrived
in a big way to the Wyobraska landscape scene, and
it looks like its here to stay. It arrived in the
form of shrub roses. While shrub roses aren’t
exclusively red, it is the red shrub roses that are
making the most dramatic impact in Wyobraska
landscapes for the simple reason that there was so
little red to see before they arrived on the scene.
Because most of the new shrub roses begin blooming
shortly after the grass turns green in the spring
and keep on blooming right up until the grass turns
brown in the late fall, you can expect to be seeing
a lot of red in Wyobraska landscapes from now on.
Remember, shrub roses are,
first and foremost, very hardy and soil adaptable
shrubs. That means that there’s no more maintenance
for shrub roses than for any other shrub in your
landscape. |
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Previous Articles
It's
Finally Spring - March 13
Spring Garden Calendar-March 20
No
Garden Left Behind-March 27
Planting Trees for a Cooler Earth in a Warmer
WyoBraska-April 3
Viburnums - Shrubs for Wyobraska Springs-April 10
Want A Water Conserving Lawn? You might already have
one-
April 17
Creating Long
Term
Tree-lationships April 24
Bigger, Bolder, Brighter,
Better—and Back In The Landscape May 01 & 08
Hardy Shrub
Roses
May 15
Another Look
at Native Plants
May 22
No Child
Left Inside
May 29
June
is Tree Care Month June 05
Summer Blooming Shrubs
June 12
Roses Are
Red.....
June 19
The Plants They will be Talking About Next Year at
the Garden Walk
June 26
Busy Summertime Gardens
July 03
Cutting Your Lawn Down to Size
July 10
July 17
Insect Paranoia
If It Will Grow In Wyoming...
July 24
Rain Gardens
July31
WyoBraska Native Grass & Wildflower Lawn
August 7
A Real WyoBraska Peach?
(Fruit Trees) August 14
Fall is for Planting
August 21
A Recipe for Enjoying Autumn Landscapes August 28
2007 Articles
2006 Articles |
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It’s always been easy to find
yellow flowered perennials for a Wyobraska
landscape—after all, this is sunflower country, and
garden center benches are filled with all sorts of
great yellow-flowered perennials that thrive in
Wyobraska landscapes. There are several types of
rudbeckias, commonly known as black-eyed susans,
each with slightly different size, foliage, or
flower. And a similarly ample number of coreopsis
with similar variations in flower, foliage, and
size. For the truly desperate homeowner there’s
always the ubiquitous yellow ever-blooming ‘Stella
de Oro’ daylily. I prefer the taller, traditional
daylilies, myself, mostly because they are much
better behaved, lower-maintenance plants.
And blue-flowered perennials
are easy too. Salvias, delphiniums, Russian sage,
blue-mist spirea, globe thistle, fall asters,
monkshood, and butterfly bush provide a full season
of this primary color—not to mention a full range of
foliage color, foliage texture, and plant size
options.
But a rainbow just isn’t a
rainbow without the color red, and seeing red in a
Wyobraska landscape has always been the difficult
task. Monarda ‘Garden view scarlet’ and monarda
‘Jacob Kline’, the two tall, red, hummingbird
attracting monardas (bee balm) have proven to be
fairly dependable Wyobraska perennials. And there
are a couple of red hardy hibiscus with those
stunning large flowers—‘Lord Baltimore’ and ‘Lady
Baltimore” being perhaps the best, for late summer
red. But hibiscus and monarda offer only a limited
range of plant size and bloom periods, and they are
more specialty perennials than the kind of
long-blooming dependable red-flowered perennial
required to complete that Wyobraska landscape
rainbow.
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And second they are a great
flowering plant. The new ever blooming shrub roses
bloom all summer—and best of all, required no
deadheading to keep them in bloom. While there are
some hardy shrub roses that can get 5-6 feet tall
and 5-6 feet wide, most of the best new shrub roses
are in the 1 ½ feet to 4 feet tall range with widths
in the 2 to 4 feet range. In other words they are
the size of shrub that most homeowners are wanting
to have in their landscapes.
Here are some of the best new
shrub roses you might want to plant so that you can
see red in your landscape:
Meidiland Red 1 ½’ x 4’ This
is a spreading rose that is also ever-blooming. Red
flowers with a small white center and hardy to zone
4.
Paint the Town 2’ X 2’ Dark
red, one of the new roses developed by Baily’s
Nursery in Minnesota hardy to zone 4
Winnipeg Parks 3’ X 3’ Light
red-pink ever bloomer, fast becoming a favorite,
hardy to zone 3
Cuthbert Grant 4’ X 3’ Dark
red, one of the oldest of the ever-blooming roses
Champlain 3’ X 3’ Dark red,
early, recurrent bloomer, hardy to zone 3
Mystic Fairy 3-4’ X 3-4’ Red
with pink undertones, hardy to zone 4
Hope For Humanity 2’ X 2’ Dark red ever blooming,
developed at Morden Research Station, Canada, hardy
to zone 3
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