YORKTON - It is hard to believe that November is almost over. To put things in a time-frame, Christmas is four weeks away; and it is 25 weeks till the long weekend in May, traditional planting time!
I know that the number might seem significant and far away, but we all know how quickly a week goes by, so the time will whittle down very quickly!
Till then, we can do some garden studying. I’ve been doing some reading about perennial beds, and how to have a successful and beautiful perennial bed. Our garden is decades old, but we all know that a garden is never really finished, but how to make it better?
We have been to beautiful gardens and I look at the perennial beds and think, ”Wow. That looks amazing. How do they do it?” Many of the plants are similar to what we have at home, but it just doesn’t look the same.
So what is the key? First of all, good planning with plant selection, and deciding what we want to see. If you want your garden to have a look of serenity, you might prefer to go with foliage perennials: hostas, gently-waving grasses, plants like heuchera with interesting leaves, even plants like daylilies that bloom early in the season but leave us with a strong and beautiful clump of shapely architectural leaves.
If you want your perennial patch to be an ongoing display of color as the season progresses, it can be achieved but will require some homework to time things out. You might want the spring blooms of iris and peonies to melt into the summer blooms of veronica, allium, and cranesbill geranium…going into the bright bursts of coreopsis and “autumn joy” sedum or the pretty pastels of achillea and jewel-tone asters as fall rolls around.
So, we see that magical garden of our dreams in our heads, but how do we begin? Yikes, this is the hard part, because we have to bring in control and reality all at once. If we have an existing perennial patch, and can envision what we’d really like, we must examine the plants that we have there now and get rid of the ones that don’t fit. Ouch! Gardeners hate to get rid of plants! But there it is: the reality of making that dream perennial patch possible.
Successful perennial patches, the ones that make us say “how do they do that?”, all have a secret that their gardeners know. The secret of ‘less is more’. They probably have fewer varieties of plants, grouped in drifts (not one here and one there) that meander one into the other, in varying heights to add even more interest. So this is where we have to pick the plants that we really can’t do without and remove the rest. Then we may have to move some around so that ‘like’ is near ‘like’: this will create more interest and impact. Okay, so now let’s go ahead in time by about 23 weeks, when the new plants are starting to arrive next May. Who can blame us if we get all excited and buy this one and that one because they just look so darn nice? This is the second secret: ‘restraint’. Rather than getting one of a whole bunch of different things, plants that look nice but will have no harmonious effect in our patch, we should try to focus on our vision for the perennial patch and form groupings.
Next spring, we will see which plants have to go, and there might be some that can be divided to replant. But once we have a plan, the rest will come easy for that dream perennial patch!
Visit the hort society at www.yorktonhort.ca and see what’s new. Thank you to our friends at YTW for their fine work. Gardeners, have a great week!
