A Plan for All Seasons : How to Have a Long Blooming Summer

If you live in a temperate climate, feel free to wander off to count your blessings (or admire your glorious landscape) while the rest of us living in areas with well-defined seasons figure out how to make the most of the time we have left — time, that is, before winter rears its icy head again.

One way to trick ourselves into thinking the time between mid-April and mid-November is longer than it really is is to give ourselves seven months of continual outdoor color. And all that takes is a little time for planning and a little more time for planting, whether for perennial flowers, ground cover, shrubs, or trees (all of which will hereafter be referred to, for simplicity’s sake, as “plants”).

Here are five key tips from landscape professionals :-

• Know which plant hardiness zone you find yourself in. Hard-core gardeners consider their planting zone as important as their area code. Purchasing bulbs and plants from area greenhouses is usually goof-proof, because they don’t sell inappropriate plant stock. If you’re a print or online catalog shopper, though, it’s easy to be seduced by breathtaking color photographs. Absent a background check, however, a gorgeous exotic-looking specimen could very well develop hypothermia, lie down, and die, never ever to be seen again. To avoid wasting time, money, and energy, simply check a map in a reliable gardening book or online to know what plants have a fighting chance of making it from one season to the next where you live.

• Once your trees have leafed out, watch for a few days to learn how much sun shines upon your wannabe garden plots. There may be areas of direct sun, part sun and part shade, and full shade. Many green-thumbers will claim the more sun the better, but don’t give short shrift to shade-loving shrubs and flowers. Granted, it’s harder to create a riot of color in a shady corner, but it just requires a bit more diligence when selecting what to plant (don’t worry – all the information you need is on the tag or label). Hydrangeas, some geraniums, and impatiens will perk up fully shaded areas, along with any of the thousands of varieties of hosta. Speaking of hosta, they’re not all just boring green and white — they vary from golden to cream and bluish- to lime-green; one variety has seersucker-like leaves, another has leaves the size of a dinner plate, and they all have beautiful white or lavender blooms of all sizes and shapes.

• Decide on your fundamental color scheme. Do you want a continuous mix of color from your perennials — for example, yellow narcissus, purple lilac bushes, red roses, orange day lilies, and bronze mums, supplemented by colorful annuals like cosmos, marigolds, and petunias? Or maybe pockets of color throughout the season, for example, all yellows in one corner, blues along the fence and white near the house? Maybe you’d prefer a succession of color, starting with early-blooming yellow jonquils, tulips, buttercups, and forsythia followed by purple irises, creeping phlox, redbud, and clematis; then the oranges of day lilies, trollius, and poppies, and ending the growing season with the reds of sumac, monarda, burning bush, smoketree, and sedum. How about variations on a theme — shades of one, maybe two colors throughout the entire season?

• Rather than attempt to fill the open area of a garden spot with perennials and ground cover, plant just a few, especially if they’re expensive. Then in the fall or following spring you can divide them. If empty spaces bug you, throw down zinnia seeds or plunk in impatiens.

• Barter with neighbors for cuttings: for instance, a fistful of lamium for a bucket of day lilies, a chunk of hosta for a few astilbes. Trading is a win-win-win — one for each of the gardeners and one for the plants that may otherwise be kicked to the curb as punishment for growing fast and thick.

When your back aches most of the time and your fingernails are perpetually dirty, be sure to remind yourself that the first few years of perennial gardening are the hardest. Once you have made the difficult decisions and dug the requisite holes, you will have time to sit back and visually reap what you have sown — that is, right after you’ve done the dead-heading, pruning, and dividing, sure cures for hands itching to feel the soil they haven’t even seen for five long months.