Surrounding ourselves with the flowers we love is the best reason for tending a garden. We pick colours that delight us, blooms with fragrances that soothe or flowers that remind us of our grandmas. Our choices reflect our garden styles and personalities.
The perennials we choose also have personality and attitude. But don't fall in love with that enticing bloom until you know more about it! That sounds a bit like good dating advice, but it's also good horticultural advice.
Consider this a matchmaking guide. Match your style with green garden companions you are unlikely to eventually quarrel with. Love will bloom.
For the meticulous gardener
Your garden edges are razor sharp. Garden soil has the fine earthy tilth of coffee grounds. You are looking for plants that know their places.
In your mind's eye, you envision a garden where rounded, tidy domes of blooms curtsy in place in front of ranks of taller perennials of perfect posture and manners.
Look for tidy plants that do not slouch all over the place, spread outside their allotted space like sloppy house guests or promiscuously self-seed.
Choose the smaller cultivars of hardy geraniums, sea thrift (armeria), moss phlox, pinks (dianthus), hostas, coral bells (Heuchera), ornamental grasses, astilbe, Siberian bugloss (Brunnera), purple coneflower (Echinacea), day lily, or royal Candles veronica.
With help in the way of plant stakes or cages (plant "corsets?") delphiniums and other tall but often floppy plants can be made to behave like perfect gentlemen.
For the free spirit
Your garden is a happy proliferation of blooms. It gets a bit messy, but you clean it up once in a while. You don't mind if your plants mingle. Those "volunteer" plants that pop up where you didn't plant them are a pleasant surprise. All you ask is that plants be bold and prolific.
Look for fast-growing, easy-care plants that can fill in bare patches easily and those with showy blooms or bold foliage. choose sedum, lamium, painted daisies (tanacetum coccineum), hollyhocks, peonies, perennial sages (salvia), poppies, bearded iris, globe thistle (Echinops), sea holly (Eryngium); lady's mantle (alchemilla), yarrow (achillea) and catmint (nepeta).
This is a good time to check into the true habits of many garden perennials. Floppy plants will begin to reveal their lazy nature as they grow tall and heavy with flowers. Plants that like to spread will make the most of summer's heat to wind their way among the stems of other plants. Self-seeders will be revealed by their apparently random distribution throughout the garden.
-- Canwest News Service
