Great gardeners have a perennial need to improve
The Washington Post
At its purest, gardening is about expressing yourself by using other life forms. Sometimes plants conform to your vision; often they do not. If your mental image of a planting design is blurry at its inception, its physical realization is even more hit or miss.
So when you have succeeded in growing a group of plants in a harmonious gathering after a few false starts, the impulse is to rest on your laurels.
But the best gardeners I know are never quite content with what they’ve done or with what they know. I am resolved to try at least three new perennials in the season ahead.
Sea holly ( is a stunning architectural plant, an electric blue, 3foot candelabra of globes with a collar of spiky bracts. You see them as dramatic plants in the flower borders of northern Europe, often varieties of a species named Eryngium giganteum. They don’t like the heat of our summers, and they lose their intensity of color as a result.
The one to pick here is E. planum. Named varieties have been developed for their more lively blue coloration, including ‘Blue Cap’, ‘ Blue Glitter’ and, among varieties growing to just 18 inches, ‘ Blue Dwarf’ and ‘Blue Diamond’. It is related to that other lover of dry environments and lean soil, Queen Anne’s lace.
Eryngium needs a bright, open site with freedraining soil, especially in winter, when its dormant crown needs to stay dry, so a blanket of mulch would be deathly.
The openness and vivid structure of eryngiums may make them hard to place, and once you put them in a spot, they won’t gladly move. But if you have a sunny, dry site, they would be neat to use with, say, agastaches, salvias, goldenrods, butterfly weed and small to medium grasses.
My second pick is the Texas red yucca, which isn’t strictly a yucca but is closely related. The yucca most people know is the late spring-flowering Yucca filamentosa, or Adam’s needle. Tall flower spikes, up to 6 feet, arise from a clump of spiky evergreen leaves.
Texas red yucca is smaller and more refined. Even better, the coral red blooms are delicate but profuse and their flowering stems appear in late June and keep going until October. Friends who grow it say it is an absolute magnet for hummingbirds. Botanically, it is Hesperaloe parviflora, and several garden varieties have been introduced.
If your garden has the opposite problem — damp soil — my third choice may be for you. Bee balm ( as a mint relative, needs even moisture. If the weather turns dry and the plant doesn’t get watered, it will object by way of coating its leaves with powdery mildew.
Monarda is a lovely perennial — long flowering, showy without being glitzy and another draw for hummingbirds. It is, as with coneflowers and liatris, one of the wildflowers at home in the garden. The common red plant is the species Monarda didyma, which blooms in June and July. A second species, M. fistulosa, takes drier conditions and flowers a little later, with lavender-purple blooms that are not quite as eye-catching.
Rated excellent for mildew resistance are: ‘Claire Grace,’ ‘Violet Queen,’ ‘Judith’s Fancy Fuchsia’ and ‘Grand Marshall.’