Echinacea « The Laptop Gardener

Efficient Perennial Maintenance

Plan First to Efficiently Maintain Perennials

The following are a few tips on developing a strategy plan to maintain your perennial plants more efficiently.

Graceful drifts of perennials greet visitors at the entrance garden to the Niagara Parks Botanical Garden and School of Horticulture in Niagara Falls, Ontario Canada.

• Draw a sketch or plan of each perennial bed or border. Indicate each plant on a scaled drawing. The time that it takes to create this valuable plan will be well spent when garden revisions are being done. Use this plan to record your ideas while they are still fresh. • Take pictures of the garden during each season. Although this is often the lowest priority item on your “to do” list, pictures are essential to help recreate the ideas noted on your plan. This is particularly helpful if you are redesigning your perennial garden in the winter. •

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Creating a Tropical Oasis in a Northern Garden

Hardy Plants to Create a Tropical Looking Garden

Tropical-looking, but hardy and native Poke in a Philadelphia area garden (warning poisonous if eaten)

One of the hot trends in gardening for the last couple of years has been to create a lush, Southern tropical oasis right in your own back yard. Transforming a ho-hum garden into a tropical paradise by using masses of brightly coloured blooms or attractive berries set off by a rich tapestry of foliage is possible to achieve, even in northern climates. Combining colour and selecting plants for their strong architectural value allows gardeners to create dramatic scenes in the garden giving the image of a tropical paradise from far, far away.

Tender variegated ginger and 'Dragon Wing' begonia in an Oklahoma garden

The trend toward creating exotic, tropical gardens around northern homes has been made become popular by gardeners who want to create a

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Summer Flowers – Gone but not Forgotten

After the flowering party is over…

Stunning Echinacea Meadowbrite Orange blooms at their peak

Their blooms have come and gone and left behind are the fallen petals and the swellings and bulges not unlike those at a mom-to-be convention. After the flowering party is over for many annuals and perennials, a gardener’s task turns to deadheading the finished blooms. The newly forming seed heads need to be removed by pinching, shearing or just plain pruning them out.

For some plants, deadheading is done to improve visual appearance. By removing the finished blooms the plant looks a lot better. Butterfly bush, ageratum, artemisia, Pelargonium (annual geranium), gazania, Solanostemon (coleus), and Rudbeckia (black-eyed Susan) fall into this category. Besides these, many plants that have white flowers will turn an unsightly brown colour when they are finished blooming. White blooming ageratum is one plant that often needs deadheading to make it look

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The Laptop Gardener

Efficient Perennial Maintenance

Creating a Tropical Oasis in a Northern Garden

Summer Flowers – Gone but not Forgotten

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