PICK A DOZEN
The path to a lovely garden is to find 12 plants you love and lose the rest.
Gardeners are always finding a new plant or two or three that tug at our hearts. We decide we have to have them before pondering where we will put them. The result is a hodgepodge of plants that are great by themselves but don’t play so well with the others in the bed.
Tom Pellett, a Memphis garden designer known for his prowess with perennials, once gave me some great advice that can be used by any gardener who tends to plant in groups of one instead of drifts of many as the design pros suggest.
His advice for turning my collection of diverse plants into a landscape is to limit flower colors in each bed — blue and yellow blooms in one, pink and purple in another and white flowers OK in both. Plants with hot colored flowers go into a bed in full blazing sun.
I’m sure this plan would improve my landscape immensely, but I never got around to digging up all of my plants to rearrange them. I wish I had the energy to take my garden from “never quite there” to done. I realize, of course, that gardens are never truly finished, but many get much closer to the end zone than mine.
Andy Pulte, a horticulturist in the plant sciences department at the University of Tennessee-Knoxville, also had some recommendations for simplifying but not oversimplifying garden designs during his presentation at Summer Celebration, an expo for ornamental plants held recently at the UT gardens in Jackson, Tennessee.
His inspiration comes from the late British garden writer Adrian Bloom and his book, “Bloom’s Best Perennials and Grasses: Expert Plant Choices and Dramatic Combinations for Year-Round Gardens.”
The aptly named Bloom and Pulte advise editing your palette to 12 super-reliable plants that you love and then finding out everything you can about their habits and needs.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Just pick a dozen different kinds of plants and run with them. I can do it, and so can you.
Then Pulte went on to suggest a list of overachieving plants he likes to use for their beauty, toughness and multi-season interest:
He’s so fond of Rozanne, a hardy geranium with violet-purple flowers, he planted a 100-foot-long “river” of them in a new garden at UT-Knoxville where he works.
They bloom for months if given afternoon shade and an occasional haircut when flowers lag.
Moonbean coreopsis is a popular choice for its longblooming lemon-yellow flowers and its needlelike foliage that gives it an airy texture.
Little Lime, the diminutive progeny of Limelight, is a sun-loving hydrangea with panicle flowers that start out lime color and then turn pink in the fall. I’m proud to report I actually “massed” three of these in my garden.
Purple coneflowers and Goldstrum rudbeckia have been a classic combo in the Mid-South for years. A new rudbeckia, Little Goldstar, offers improvements like its compact size and more refined, less prairie-like looks. It is also less susceptible to leaf spot diseases.
Pulte notes that many of the new echinacea varieties with dramatic yellow and orange flowers including some pompons are not as winter-hardy as the old reliable types.
But the newest kid on the block with a fun name, Echibeckia, exhibits the winter hardiness of echinacea with the looks of rudbeckia.
Yellow Summerina echibeckia has large flowers with orange petals and a rusty-orange “halo” around the dark brown cone. Look for these next year.
Because he believes every garden should have a great backdrop, Pulte recommends a new version of the common Eastern cedars that naturalize in open spaces in 37 states.
It’s Taylor, a columnar evergreen tree that grows as tall as 30 feet but remains just a little over 3 feet in width. Similarly shaped and hardy is the shorter Degroot spires, a thuja or arborvitae that reaches 20 feet in height and 4 to 5 feet in width.
Other plants Pulte puts in his dozen picks are Peek-a-Blue Russian sage, a more compact version of this drought-tolerant plant that grows 12 to 36 inches tall and 24 to 36 inches wide and doesn’t flop over.
The new lavender, Phenomenal, is the best variety for hot humid climates. Ornamental grasses such as pink mulhy grass and Morning Light, a variegated miscanthus, bring movement to the garden as they sway in the wind and glow in the sunlight.
Mattie Mae Smith, a sweet bay magnolia with evergreen variegated foliage and long-blooming fragrant white flowers on a small tree that will reach 15 feet in height.
Cannova cannas, which are grown from seeds instead of fleshy tubers, flower early and long and are compact. Scarlet Bronze features red flowers and dark leaves.