13,520 Garden Web Discussions | Perennials

I have a hard time getting rid of any plants. I have ambitious plans this fall to redo and expand my main sunny garden bed, so I have been thinking about potential SP candidates though.

Red Hot Poker lily. Started from seed. Very short bloom period and the rest of the year has long, floppy, unattractive leaves. I might just move to a less visible spot though. Kind of my solution for every under performing plant.

Sweet Intoxication Roses (two!). Boy , these things are just pitiful. But even their piddly, disease ridden, japanese beetle infested flowers smell great. I am going to give them one more year.

Considering NOT growing annual snapdragon, cleome or nasturtiums anymore. I love these flowers, but they all have problems here. Snapdragons are apparently favored by four lined plant bug which does horrendous foliar damage in the spring. Cleomes and flea beetles, ugh! And my nasturtiums...I think my soil is just too high in clay for them.

I have a tradescantia with bright pink flowers that gets red spider mites every year. Tradscantia Sweet kate doesn't have this same problem. I already SP one clump of the pink flowering one and the second clump will probably go soon too.

A clump of orange/marooon asiatic lilies. These are prolific multipliers, but they fade quickly and aren't all that attractive.

My biggest SP candidate is a crab apple tree planted by the previous owners far too close to the foundation. Beautiful spring display...but has to be cut back every year to avoid scraping our roof plus this year is has started to grow in front of our living room window. With all the cutting back needed on it, a painful to look at contorted silhouette has developed. Also the japanese beeltes love it. The front yard needs a big redo IMO anyways as it relies heavily on spirea which are currently covered in crispy brown flower heads. But, I probably won't actually tackle this project until spring or next fall.

Candidates for removal this fall when the weather is cooler:
spirea 'Golden Elf'. Looked great for the first two seasons and now experiences significant die back every winter and looks pitiful all summer. I am also considering removing some daylilies with short scapes that bloom in the foliage. Not the best look.

Thanks for the reply! I went and bought two more to jazz up the gardene along the driveway! We'll see how it goes in zone 5!

Len

I got this plant last year loved it but this year it is not what it should be. it is a monster and does not smell like mint. This is the second plant I got at Lowes that did this to me.

I find cutting the phlox and other perennials down to ground level, by late fall, just about eliminates the appearance of powdery mildew in the following year.

'Sunny', I have always left perennial plants as is until the spring...with the understanding that the above ground dead veg. provides winter protection...like a mulch. But at the least I will do as you do for the phlox as an experiment.

Rouge, know you said you had two 'Peppermint Twist'.

See they're planted close together.
Almost ideal from a controlled experimental point of view, because they likely get the same sun, water, it's the same year, etc..

So you could cut one down and leave the other and see the effect next year (only one variable varied).

Just kidding!
Don't think the pair, one tall and one short, would look so nice next year.

All of my garden phlox have done just that since we moved to blazing hot Kansas in 2007. No amount of water or babying helped. I grew real beauties in Chicago, but not here, where I tried for five years. No more, and I reallymiss growing them.

All of my garden phlox have done just that since we moved to blazing hot Kansas in 2007. No amount of water or babying helped. I grew real beauties in Chicago, but not here, where I tried for five years. No more, and I reallymiss growing them.

Flowergirl70ks,
Face it, some of us are just too fragile to survive the kind of heat you live with. I'd be digging me a deep cave if I lived where you do.

LizEMA,
It does sound as if the heat got the better of your Delphinium. Hopefully temporarily. We'll all send positive vibes in your direction and hope it returns with cooler weather.

Martha

Everybody,
Thank you ALL SO much for responding. :-) I so very much appreciate all of the insight that you've all given. My delph had already survived a previous heatwave (though less intense) several weeks ago completely unscathed so I was fairly baffled, but, duh! Of course that kind of intense heat is going to make an impact. I just wanted to make sure it wasn't something *I* was doing or NOT doing.

I have learned very quickly that yes, Ken, things are ALWAYS changing in my yard. (I lost almost all of my coreopsis this year to HORRIFIC powdery mildew. :( And, no, EMA is not my location; I'm in southern NY.) As a beginner, it's nice to be reminded that sometimes Mother Nature does not always comply with our own plans and it's not always from lack of care or love that causes our beautiful plant babies to not do well or, worse, DIE.

I'm sure that you can all relate to that feeling of being completely lost and not knowing ANYTHING when just getting started. It's overwhelming and imbues such a sense of failure; sometimes it feels like I'll never know what I'm doing. It's invaluable being privy to the knowledge of gardening veterans, and I am truly grateful to all that responded. You guys are AWESOME! Thanks again, all!

Idabean, thanks for the book suggestion. I just ordered it from Barnes and noble!
I'm a newbie gardener and there's only so much advice I can find via google ;-)

I second the suggestion of the "Well Tended Perenial Garden". The first garden I ever planted I did following her exact instructions on amending the soil. Everything grew like gangbusters.

Thanks, Linda, for that info. That might explain why some of us have more seedlings than others.

I went out to water today (grrr, still mad that the rain they talked about for a week never materialized!) and the coneflowers were just covered in butterflies. So, I have to say, they're not bothering me quite as much anymore, lol. How can they, when the butterlflies are enjoying them so much?

Dee

Lovely picture, Dee. I'm with you on both counts. I love it when the hummers, bees, and butterflies enjoy my plants. Makes all the work maintaining them worthwhile!

And we too are still waiting for the rain that was promised, along with the cooler weather that was supposed to be here today. No rain and a 70 dewpoint - yuck. Looks like we'll be dragging the hose tomorrow. It's been almost two weeks since we've had any appreciable rain here. And before that, it rained almost every day for two weeks. Nothing like feast or famine.

Linda

If you are like me, I like to place the plants in spots to visualize what it will look like before planting. So when I redid a bed last fall, I put everything into pots for the time being, reshaped the bed, added amendment, shuffled my planted pots around to my liking and then replanted. I reused potting mix from potted annuals from that year and I think the process took me on/off two weeks. I would not recommend it in the middle of the summer or if you are going to be taking on a huge project requiring lots of time and are unable to water the pots regularly.

gardenweed..I.would love to see this year's pics of your gardens. Remember I've been AWOL for most of the year from GW due to DH's health problems..so I have missed them if you have already posted them.

In my experience this thing spreads like crazy. I started with one plant several years ago and now they are all over my yard and have even spread to a rocky patio area. I would leave them be. It's often that the center "mother" plant dies anyhow and the side plants live on. I've never had to reseed them. They just appear here and there.

The do reseed, but for me, never where I want them to. This year all the seedlings wound up in my lawn, so I dug them up and moved them.

This is the Garden-Lovers biggest problem. It takes several years to enrich the soil, fill out areas, cultivate your gardens and then, suddenly, a corner has been turned and everything has exploded!

After 10 years in this house, this has happened to us. We are running out of planting room and running out of pots to transplant things into and not wanting to purchase more soil to put them in anyhow. Plus, many of our neighbors are not such great gardeners.

Sadly, I've begun to go down that dark road of death that Ken mentioned. But instead of throwing them in the lawn, we throw them over the edge of the river onto a bank we want to berm up.

yeah..; but you probably fertilize your lawn.. i dont.. so anything i can immediately compost back into it.. is a bonus...

but i learned the hard way ... you better do it before they go to seed.. lol.. or you will have a very colorful lawn ... lol

ken

I'm curious, does the variegation look all that white/cream in real life? I took a peek at pics online of it and it doesn't look all that different from 'Sunningdale Variegated' (which I have). Only one pic showed VG looking super white and the rest kind of look like my SV in that transitional stage, when the foliage ages a bit and the gold in the variegation "creams out" a bit, LOL.

This probably isn't at all helpful since it isn't exactly the cultivar you are inquiring about but...the most difficult thing with my SV was placement. A smidge too much sun and the edges would burn. Too much shade and the variegation greened out faster. Did you put yours in a more shaded site or slightly sunnier?
CMK

Part shade; little direct sun (maybe an two hours or so) but very bright shade - brunnera go gangbusters in this location as does chasmanthium, to give you an idea.

Spedigrees, garden campanella is great, this one, trust me you don't want it! It's very invasive, it's everywhere all the time.

A cousin gave me a plant of Adenophora a few years ago. It was in bloom and I thought it was so pretty. Then she said, "it really spreads. I have it everywhere!" That was a red flag to me. I looked it up online and then sealed it up in a trash bag and got rid of it. I'm thankful after reading these posts!