13,520 Garden Web Discussions | Perennials

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!

karin, I enjoy my mums and have no complaints about them. I have been surprised to find enough mums that come back for me every year. IâÂÂve ordered some from Bluestone that have worked out to be pretty hardy, but I donâÂÂt know about zone 4. I just went to the Bluestones Perennial website and see they have a new feature, you can search by zone. I plugged in zone 4 and only three or four mums came up, so there are a couple but not a large variety. IâÂÂm in zone 6 and most people still use mums as annuals here. Do you use asters at all? I see there are a lot more asters to choose from for your zone. I have a couple of asters I'm happy with too.

I can certainly see the use of Pawnee Buttes and I think it has a nice airy quality to it. If you have a photo of a bed thatâÂÂs edged in it, IâÂÂd be interested to see it.

IâÂÂm going to look for those two roses, because IâÂÂm always wanting to try something that performs that well. Good suggestion. I just looked up the Drift rose series and it does have a lot of colors. You have the pink drift, right? The size of the bloom reminds me of a âÂÂFairyâ Rose.

I just looked up that âÂÂHoneybushâ Honeysuckle and I was surprised to see it is a native shrub? Could that be right? The photo I saw is a very cute little shrub. I see it is said to spread to 6ft and get 3ft tall. Does that mean it suckers? Is it fragrant?

IâÂÂm so sick of that side of the bed, I may pull out a lot of what IâÂÂm trying to get rid of and throw in some annuals for the rest of this year. I would rather look for roses in the spring then buy something that has been sitting around the nursery in this heat this year.

Here is a photos of asters I've been happy with. They usually bloom just before the mums and not together with them.

And here is another shot of an aster in the upper right of the photo with a mum next to it, so you can see it's not ready to bloom yet. That same little aster is huge this year, I'll have to get a photo of it. I think this photo was back in 2008. I've only had one year that the weather made a mess of it.

I agree, thanks for posting. So lovely to see. Interesting also how blooming times of similar plants vary by location.

In a garden walk last week one garden had several hundred different day lilies. Reading the names was half the fun.

100 seedlings! I assume that they had to grow to a far size for you to know the information you were looking for.

I'm not sure I'd have the room or the patience.

You don't want peat with lavender. It will retain far too much water and eventually the peat turns into a sponge. I would use a cactus/succulent mix with some added pebbles/stones.

I would only water once, maybe twice a week if it is really hot. How often are you watering? Your potting medium is too moisture retentive if it is staying moist for three days baking in this hot sun. They are not fans of a ton of water, but this is more of a problem in winter.

English lavender does fine in my swamp. A lot of Mediterranean type plants seem to like a fair amount of water, no matter what the books say.

In other words, my in the ground lavender has handled several inches of rain a week without getting at all offended. I don't think it has ever heard of crown rot. The plants really don't read the same books we do.

Preen works on emerging seeds. Unless you are planting seeds, you don't need to worry.

Ditto Ken & nhbabs - Preen is a pre-emergent* weed seed application that doesn't work on weeds that have already germinated from seed or spread via runners or roots. Assuming you're planting bulbs, it shouldn't affect the growth of your lilies. Since it's a petroleum-based product, its environmental impact & consequences is an entirely separate discussion.

* prior to seeds sprouting