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    Home Gardener's Perennials & Bulbs: The Complete Guide to Growing 58 Flowers in Your Backyard
    Home Gardener's Perennials & Bulbs: The Complete Guide to Growing 58 Flowers in Your Backyard
    Home Gardener's Perennials & Bulbs: The Complete Guide to Growing 58 Flowers in Your Backyard
    Ebook331 pages1 hour

    Home Gardener's Perennials & Bulbs: The Complete Guide to Growing 58 Flowers in Your Backyard

    By Miranda Smith

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    About this ebook

    This guide to creating beautiful gardens with eye-catching perennials covers designing gardens, improving the soil, planting, fertilizing, and maintaining perennials and bulbs, illustrated with hundreds of step-by-step color photographs.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCreative Homeowner
    Release dateMar 27, 2018
    ISBN9781607655091
    Home Gardener's Perennials & Bulbs: The Complete Guide to Growing 58 Flowers in Your Backyard
    Author

    Miranda Smith

    Miranda Smith was an expert grower who gardened and taught gardening for over 30 years. She was the author of five top-selling garden books, including Your Backyard Herb Garden, Backyard Fruits and Berries, and Greenhouse Gardening. She edited and was the primary writer of The Real Dirt, Farmers Tell about Organic and Low Input Practices in the Northeast.

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      Book preview

      Home Gardener's Perennials & Bulbs - Miranda Smith

      Introduction

      PERENNIAL AND BULB GARDENS

      Home Gardener’s Perennials & Bulbs will help you create attractive gardens, borders, and other plantings using perennials and bulbs. Perennials and many bulbs grow back each season, providing recurring colors and textures that can serve to anchor your landscape. You can plant them separately for an eye-catching display or use them in combination to enjoy extended blooming times. Smart gardeners team perennials and bulbs with annuals to vary their garden designs from year to year. No matter which course you take, you can use this book to design a well-planned garden that will reflect your creativity and personal tastes.

      Home Gardener’s Perennials & Bulbs guides you through the basics of gardening. You’ll learn how to select the best plants for your location and which plants will thrive under ideal and not so ideal conditions. Handy guides will tell you when popular perennials and bulbs are at their best. Extensive directories of favorites provide important information about the plants, including sizes, planting requirements, maintenance recommendations, and the best cultivars of each variety. And because they appear year after year, there is information on planting, transplanting, and dividing these plants.

      IllustrationIllustrationIllustration

      About perennials

      What are perennials?

      PLANNING

      Aperennial is a plant that lives for at least three years. The plants we think of as perennials are, for the most part, herbaceous, meaning that aboveground parts of the plant—the stems and leaves—are soft and green, not woody. In cold climates the top growth of most herbaceous perennials dies back each winter and the plants become dormant; in spring, new top growth develops. In warm climates, some perennials are evergreen, retaining their leaves and stems all year; others become dormant during summer droughts.

      IllustrationIllustrationIllustrationIllustration

      USING PERENNIALS

      Perennials are flower garden classics. You can grow them in beds and borders by themselves, in combination with annuals and bulbs, or with small shrubs, trees, and ground covers.

      The majority of perennials are most valued for their lovely flowers, though many produce attractive foliage. The art of garden design is partially a matter of combining plants with various blossom colors, textures, and shapes. With perennials—as opposed to annuals that bloom all season—time also becomes an important design element. Because most perennials bloom for just a few weeks a season, you’ll need to choose plants that bloom at differing times to have garden color throughout the season.

      Many perennials spend most of the growing season as a clump of stems and leaves, so good design also depends on choosing plants for their overall form, texture, and foliage. In fact, experienced garden designers treat plant form, texture, and foliage as the primary design qualities, and flower color as a secondary consideration. See here for examples of some of the most common plant and flower forms and here for foliage qualities.

      CHOOSING PLANTS

      As you begin to choose perennials, make a list of plants that you’ve seen and liked in other gardens, books, and nursery catalogs. For each one, note the flower color and form, its time of bloom, the height and shape of the plant, and its foliage shape and color. This may sound like a lot of work, but it makes things much easier when you lay out your garden. To help narrow down your list, weed out all the plants that aren’t suited to your growing conditions—temperatures, light, soil, and moisture.

      If making this list seems daunting, rest assured that many a good garden has come into being through a process of trial and error. Don’t be intimidated. After all, if you don’t like a perennial in one spot, you can always dig it up and move it next year.

      Illustration

      Add interest to your garden by combining plants with a variety of sizes, forms, and flower types, as well as a pleasing mix of colors.

      Illustration

      Add interest to your garden by combining plants with a variety of sizes, forms, and flower types, as well as a pleasing mix of colors.

      SEASONAL STARS

      Most perennials bloom for just two to three weeks a year, so if you want to have flowers blooming throughout the growing season, you’ll need to combine plants with different bloom times. For a long display, interplant spring and summer-blooming bulbs and annuals, many of which flower all summer long, with your perennials.

      Orchestrating a succession of bloom from spring to fall can be a complicated job. To make it easier, first make a map of the garden-to-be. Draw in the locations of clumps of plants before you decide what they will be. After that, choose your color scheme and assign colors to the different plant clumps.

      Now it’s time to select plants. Choose those in the appropriate colors, being mindful to plan for a variety of blooming times, heights, plant forms, flower shapes, and textures. Use the box here to guide you to perennials that flower at different times. (See here for profiles of these plants.)

      Long-Blooming Perennials

      Some perennials bloom for an especially long time. They are beautiful in themselves but are also valuable because they help bridge gaps between more seasonal flowers that come and go. The following plants bloom continuously for four to six weeks, or produce flushes of bloom off and on all summer. Some plants, such as foxgloves and some delphiniums, often bloom a second time if cut back after flowering.

      •‘Autumn Joy’ stonecrop (Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’)

      •Balloon flower (Platycodon grandiflorus)

      •Bee balm (Monarda didyma)

      •Blanket flower (Gaillardia species )

      •Bugbane (Cimicifuga racemosa)

      •Catmint (Nepeta x faassenii)

      •Coneflower (Rudbeckia fulgida ‘Goldsturm’)

      •Daylily (Hemerocallis ‘Stella de Oro’, ‘Black Eyed Stella’, and ‘Happy Returns’)

      •Fringed bleeding heart (Dicentra eximia)

      •Lancaster geranium (Geranium sanguineum var. striatum)

      •Obedient plant (Physostegia virginiana)

      •Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea)

      •Speedwell (Veronica spicata ‘Goodness Grows’ and ‘Sunny Border Blue’)

      •Thrift (Armeria maritima)

      •Tickseed (Coreopsis verticillata ‘Moonbeam’)

      •Yarrow (Achillea species )

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