The Best Perenials??

chella71

Hello there,
I have a largish (80 x 30) garden which I love, but, being a mum of two young children and working full time I do not have as much time as I would like to dedicate to it.
I have only been living here two years and have had to bring it round from the wilderness!! So now I have a pretty boring blank canvass of lawn and borders. I have already planted quite a few perenials in the borders but am quite naive and dont have much of a clue really!! But what I would like is year round colour!! What I have been finding is that most of the perenials I have planted flower and then look pretty rank for the rest of the summer, so my question is are there any perenials that keep on flowering throughout the summer? Or do any of you experts have any other ideas of how to make my lovely but boring garden look a little better, but still low maintenance??

Thank you in advance for Any advice

Chella

Linda32

First thoughts, Dahlia's are more of a late summer flower. They are not perenial as such, but produce tubers that can be left in the ground* or dug up, stored and replanted after risk of frost the following year.


*Now heres the rub with dahlia's, I'm in the midlands and this winter we have had heavy frosts, 2-3 snow falls, one lasting over a week and quite deep for us. I garden on heavy clay, all of which are very likely to kill off dahlias left in the ground.

Nope, it didn't, I sowed last year, for the first time, bedding dahilas, which flowered there socks off, and me being a lazy mare left them in the ground until I had a big tidy up during January. Where I found perfectly hard - (thats good) tubers.

So these are maybe late flowering plants that are hassle free

chella71

Thanks Linda that sounds like a good idea!!! we are on the uppermost South east, if that makes sense (south of
bedford) and on clay soil so in a relitively similar situation, to be honest I love the idea of hardy hassle free flowers ( I know, I don't ask for much )
Thank you!!!

Chella

soupdragon10

Sedum spectabile (ice plant). Bees and butterflies love it and it spreads forming nice big clumps. Comes in red/lilac/purple and is easy to get hold of.

cootambear

alpine strawbs put out little flowers in flushes throughout the summer. they are a pretty plant and good ground cover. the fruit is gourmet fodder.

Daisymaisy

Day lillies (hemerocallis) seem to be at home in my London clay and seem to be tough as nails, mine have started sprouting and the leaves are about an inch tall. The flowers only last a day hence the name but they are prolific and keep coming and they come in a variety of colours. The leaves also make an attractive green clump before the flowers arrive.

Kered

Second vote for Day Lillies
also
Phlox
Hosta
Astibile
Hollyhock
Sedum
Dianthus
Aster
Anemone
Primula
Geranium
Peony

cootambear

I`ve always thought the flowers of this bush very pretty, and they last all summer


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuchsia_(plant)

angelavdavis

To be honest, because of the issues you describe about stuff dying down, I always recommend mixing perennials with interesting shrubs that can offer a framework all year round - particularly concentrating on evergreens such as euonymous which are pretty cheap to pick up as small bushes. Usually, you would plant the large shrubs first, then add perennials but you can still do it the other way round, although you might have to relocate some perennials (steer clear of moving paeonies of anything that doesn't approve of being moved)

You can also go for plants that provide winter interest - either because they are evergreen (spotted laurel), great berries (pyracanthea), coloured stems/leaves (red stemmed dogwoods, smoke bushes or photinia) or architectural value (such as phormiums, euphorbia or fatsias).

Look at climbers to grow through plants that flower earlier in the year - as well as the lovely flowering ones choose variegated honeysuckle, or evergreen clematis (armandii) as well as bare stemmed flowering plants such as winter jasmine. This works well when mixing shrubs and perennials in the garden.

Look also for perennials that have coloured or variegated leaves such as heucheras - you can get a variety of coloured leaves ranging from deep plum through to ligher pink and acid green. They provide flowers, but it is actually the leaf that provides the interest most of the year. Whilst a biennial, sweet honesty is a lovely plant - highly scented purple and white flowers and lovely silvery paper seed pods which provide autumn interest.

I would then also look at groundcover plants such as saponaria ocymoides. Bushy green growth and pink flowers in May-June. Poundland are doing the root cuttings at the moment - 3 to a packet I think. When it gets too straggly, I simply chopped it into shape with the shears in winter and it grew back from the cut stems.

Adjuga is another low growing plant, you can select from a variety of variegated forms and they change colour when they get cold. They do have a small blue flower but are generally grown for their leaves.

You could also mix herbs into the border (and even veg) to provide other interest.

Keeping pots of flowers that you can put into dull areas is also a good idea, pots of summer bulbs such as lilies or gladioli. You can grow them elsewhere in the garden, then when ready to flower, simply place in the border where your gap is.

Hardy annuals are also very easy to grow. My parents were selling their house and, as they weren't really gardeners, I bought some packets of annuals for the garden (cornflowers, nigella, candytuft, cerinthe, clarkia, etc). To plant the annuals, I had sorted the seed by height, then put all of a similar final height in a small tub mixed with some compost and sprinkle around the areas where there were gaps in the planting. I then raked the area over lightly. After a few weeks of growing, you could spot the plants from the weeds and pull up any obvious weeds. You can then thin them if needed. Yes a riot of colour which if you dead head, keep going strong well into autumn. Not good if you are colour co-ordinating your planting though!

I would also recommend taking photos through the year of dull areas, make a note of the rough size of the gap in a trusty notebook, then look up what is in flower or has interest at that time of year so you can plan to plant the following year.

Personally (and as I suspect you are finding), I have always found perennial only borders too exhausting! I have dabbled - I had 20 lovely nicotiana silvestris plants which I grew from seed (lovely 6 foot high, night scented - almost glow in the dark), I planted them in the garden and the slugs had every one of them - they were stalks by the next morning! Heartbreaking! I always worked full time and found them so much work for so little enjoyment. I really admire cottage gardens, etc as I understand how much work they require to keep looking good. There are techniques for getting perennials to flower a second time in the year, etc. Carol Klein is one expert in perennials that I would read up on definitely.

chella71

Wow, what a lot of brilliant ideas, some of the plants I already have, most of them inherited with the house, the problem was that the previous owner was in his 90's and basically got ill and consequently over a number of years the garden went to pot!
I inherited a beautiful fushia, rhodedendrum, hydranger, fruit trees, clematis (beautiful when it flowers but a stringy mess the rest of the year!), pyracantha, rose and wild rose bushes and a few others but it still doesn't fill the borders.

Soupdragon sounds great, love the idea of more bees and butterflies, we do get quite a few bees but not many butterflies :cool:

Cootambear, do the alpine strawbs end up taking over the garden? Love the thought of the fruit For some reason the fushia pic didn't come up x

Kered, definitely sounds like the day lillies are a good idea then, thank you for all the other ideas too!!

Angeladavis, wow so much information, you really know your stuff, hopefully in about 20 years time I'll know a bit more too I know exactly what you mean with regards to the high maintenance, sometimes I feel like by the time I've finished the weeding its time to start all over again!! So I would like to 'fill' the borders out a bit with much lower maintenance things, but hope that they are still pretty, alot of the neighbours seem to end up with endless conifers. Evergreen Clematis sounds like an excellent idea, I love the flowers on these
DaisymaisyDay lillies

Daisymaisy, day lillies sound really pretty, do they need lots of sun?

Managed to paint the fence yesterday too, dried really quickly in the wind too, now to get on with the other million or so jobs to do in it :eek:

Thanks again!!

Chella x

soupdragon10

If you want to attract butterflies see if you can find room for a Buddleia I've several around my garden (grown from an original cutting given to me when we moved in). The flowers are always covered with butterflies and they flower over quite a long time.