Perennial Plant of the Year: Baptisia australis
February 10, 2010 by Doug
Filed under Featured, Perennials
Perennial Plant of the YearT: Baptisia australis has always been one of my favorite perennials. One of the taller violet-blue flowers you can have for your early summer garden. This means of course you can put it to the middle-back of the border where little else is flowering (except iris) at this [...]
Actaea rubra
December 12, 2009 by Doug
Filed under Featured, Perennials
Actaea rubra is one of my favorite shade plants. Perfect for mid-to-late summer berries if grown in shade and on the moist side (not for the dry shade garden). The berries are quite poisonous (hence the popular name of Baneberry) and small children should be watched carefully around this plant. Note there [...]
Coneflowers yet again
November 5, 2009 by Doug
Filed under Perennials
Just when you think you understand and have written about as much as your reader’s can stomach about coneflowers, along comes another rash of questions and fellow garden writers writing about this plant.
When the new plants started appearing on the gardening scene, I remember hearing from the originating nurseries that we in the production nursery [...]
Perennial Flowers and Record Keeping
November 2, 2009 by Doug
Filed under Opinion, Perennials
Some random thoughts about perennial flowers and record-keeping. I got a few comments – on and off-list about my latest blog post so here are the answers.
Do I keep records? Sort of. I keep records of trial plants so I know what’s going on with that plant. I’ll show you the [...]
List of Perennial Flowers
October 30, 2009 by Doug
Filed under Perennials
When it comes to making a list of perennial flowers that I like to grow, I run smack into my enthusiasm for this class of flowering plants. In my old nursery days, I grew over 1800 varieties for sale and I have absolutely no idea how many were in the gardens (well over 1800) [...]
New Perennials Fall 2009
October 14, 2009 by Doug
Filed under Perennials, Plants
This is what five-hundred dollars of specialty perennials looks like when it’s sitting in one spot on the porch. In the garden, it now occupies about 100 square feet of garden space. And I wouldn’t have it any other way as they’ll grow up into rather interesting plants. Now, next spring I’ve [...]
Shade Garden
September 11, 2009 by Doug
Filed under Design, Perennials
I happen to like this combination of Heuchera ? (don’t know the variety) and Pulmonaria ‘Silver Shimmers’ – in a part shade location it looks good almost all summer (except when the silly Heuchera blooms and then I usually cut them off because I think they’re ugly)
The trick to keeping them looking good is water. [...]
