Perennial Begging

A week ago, I received the most wonderful gift. Alison from The Backyard Larder sent me a collection of edible perennial plants to restart my garden – a transplant from her garden to mine

We’ve been making a lot of progress in the garden this year, including processing many of the plants in pots that travelled from the old garden, and were waiting to find a permanent home. Some have moved on yet again, to a friend’s garden. Some pots were filled with nothing but weeds, and have been emptied into the green waste bin. As the clutter subsides, it’s easier to keep track of what I’ve got, and where it is. One of the pots that has resurfaced from the chaos holds ‘Minogue’s Onion’, a slightly mysterious species that was given to me by the late Patrick Whitefield. He described it in Permaculture Magazine a few years ago, but never uncovered its scientific name. It’s a perennial allium with the flattened leaves of a garlic, and forms a clump of strongly-flavoured (he said) salad onions in the winter. In the summer it forms small, round bulbs, which you harvest by digging up the clump and replanting a few to allow it to continue. They don’t need peeling, apparently, which sounds appealing. The plant is supposed to die back in summer; mine hasn’t yet. I have never seen it flower; I don’t think it does.

Perennials are a huge group of plants that should survive year after year. The majority of perennial plants discussed here are herbaceous in that the leaves and stems die back and new growth restarts from the buried roots in the new year.

Growing Tips

Many gardens have soil that is too poor to be worth improving particularly when some perennials would thrive there anyway. Here is a top 14 selection of perennial plants that are tolerant of poor conditions.

Great plants for the herbaceous border, these hardy Geraniums are top notch plants that are easy to grow and cultivate.

This summer flowering perennial has good disease and pest resistance. The plumes of flowers stand above fine foliage

Do you have a shady garden where you would like to plant perennials? Hostas, ferns, and Lenten roses are the usual choices, but there are a number of wonderful perennial selections to choose from that will add bloom, texture, and color to your landscape. Here are several of my favorite early spring bloomers.

H URRY, QUICK, RUSH: Get them before they vanish, and before the next pretty face distracts your gaze. That’s May in the garden here, a mad rush of bulbs and then ephemerals, and the first stick-around-awhile perennials, too, all happening beneath a canopy of blooming trees and shrubs. Have a quick look at some current beauties in the slideshow below, and I’ll be back to the computer to write profiles of the ones you haven’t met before.

I used to grow Joe Pye weed, Eupatorium purpureum (above), in the back row of mixed borders with much smaller perennials. Eventually I relegated all these super-tall types to a bed of their own, where they could shine together instead of be the only bright light in beds with foreground companions who had seen better days, the sometimes-unavoidably tattered heroes of spring and early summer.One other resident of the big bed is Rudbeckia ‘Herbstsonne’ (I also see it listed various places as ‘Herbstonne,’ see comment from Yvonne after the post) or autumn sun coneflower (photo above). It gets to about 8 feet, with a wonderful linear quality and a graceful sway in every breeze.Both of

THE ANNUAL VEGETABLE-GARDEN ARCHAEOLOGICAL DIG yielded the usual suspects—perennials and small shrubs I plunge in there for wintertime storage, things I use in summer pots: huge hosta clumps (I do love hostas) and Hakonechloa and other random bits. In went 3 inches of compost, 10 pounds of lime per 100 square feet, an all-natural organic fertilizer made of meals and manures, seeds for short rows of various salad greens, and a few-dozen onion plants.

IAM LOOKING FOR ANY BRIGHT SPOTS ABOUT NOW, as the mid-October-looking garden surfaces in this driest September.  A couple of easy, big perennials—Lespedeza thunbergii (above), the bush clover, and some favorite Aralias (including Aralia cordata and A.