The garden book I found most helpful when I planted our first perennial garden recommended building around 5 main plants: peonies, daylilies, phlox, mums and I think iris. I got the book from the library – and it has been over 40 years! – so I don’t remember for sure. It was either iris or shasta daisies.
I like the basic principle even though I’m not crazy about either iris or daisies (probably why I don’t remember which she recommended). It makes sense to use the big, bloom-erific plants as your center pieces and tuck in gorgeous flowers like pinks or delphiniums, asters or lilies around the edges. I like to use clumps of daylilies or phlox, edge with pinks and use lilies or delphiniums for height and color contrast.
Her (I do remember the author was a lady) advice also gives us a garden that blooms more or less continuously from late May through late October with only a few scattered low-flower periods. Right now we are in one of those lulls; peonies are almost done and daylilies are just beginning.
What Is Blooming Now
The peony side shoots are all that’s left.
Last Pink Peony June 23, 2016
This is the view from the right hand garden looking north last night. Most of the big green plants are peonies (done) or daylilies (full of buds) or phlox (waiting). You can see a few red lilies and some volunteer cosmos along the fence.
Perennial Beds Looking North from the South End
These early bird volunteer wild orange daylilies are pretty but need to go the other side of the fence where they can help keep down the weeds.
Tall Volunteer Orange Daylilies
Delphiniums
The brightest spot right now is this deep orange/purple blue combo in the left hand garden.
Delphinium and Butterfly Weed Glowing in Evening June 23, 2016
I like delphiniums a lot and they thrive here in the full sun. These are the new Millennium series plants that we bought locally and planted last spring. They bloomed a little last year and are huge with multiple spikes of full rich blue this year. They should re-bloom all summer if we cut down the bloomed-out spikes and keep fertilizing.
Changes for Next Year
Later this summer we may rearrange a couple daylilies. Two are blooming now (other than the wild orange plants) but they are planted in different parts of the garden so they don’t grab your eye. It might work to put one or two of the early-blooming plants in with the large groups of daylilies which bloom later in the summer. The long picture shows the big clump of daylilies in the right hand bed; these are big vigorous plants with lots of flowers but two of them aren’t real pretty. I need to mark those and switch them around.
The orange daylilies need moving too. They are intermixed with some of my best plants and it’s hard to separate without missing root pieces. (And all it takes is a root piece to get another orange plant.)
This fall plant a few later blooming flowers in front of the Sweet Williams. The Sweet Williams are incredible for about three weeks, then look crummy the rest of the summer. I didn’t have the heart to rip out any plants this spring but if I can make myself do it, we could hide the yucky looking dead-ish foliage behind short asters or mums.
Up Next
Next week we should have beautiful flowers to show! The daylilies are full of buds and they take over the garden for a few weeks until the phlox start. Plus we have more lilies and our cosmos (all volunteer re-seeders from last summer) are going crazy and the zinnias should start too.
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