13,520 Garden Web Discussions | Perennials

Here are some of the large patches left to kill (half dead already anyway...)

The last picture is a detail crop of the 2nd to last, showing the growth on the B.E.S. (Taken w phone rather than good camera, so they don't give such a vivid impression of the virulence)

Wow, I, too, am thankful to Ralph for posting the photos that so vividly show the problems/how Aster yellows affects plants!

Aruncus dioicus

If you can get your hands on a copy of Native Plants of the Northeast by Donald Leopold, you''ll find two pages of ferns and fernlike plants, grasses and grasslike plants, wildflowers, vines, shrubs and trees that tolerate shade.

Some of my shrubs are:

Shrubs: calycanthus, leucothoe (which is evergreen, tiny cream flowers in early spring), lindera benzoin (spicebush - obligate host for spicebush swallowtail butterfly), sambucus (elderberry), rhododendron & azalea.

If you want to fill out with perennials/groundcovers, some of my favorites are wild ginger, cimicifuga (the 4-5' tall flower racemes glow in the slanting rays of late afternoon sun coming through the tree canopy), dicentra eximia and d. cucullaria (fern-leaf bleeding heart and Dutchman's breeches, respectively), crested iris, tiarella.

Not mentioned in Leopld's list (most of these are not native), but among my favorites are heuchera (coral bells - all kinds of foliage colors!), aucuba ('Gold Dust' has evergreen leaves flecked with gold), variegated Solomon's Seal (it does spread, but it easy to pull out), sarcocca (sweet box - small broad-leaved evergreen with tiny but very fragrant flowers in late winter), epimedium (check variety - some are clump-forming, others are runners), and pulmonaria.

Maybe so, it looked like a grass.

I don't know, I just keep planting them too close together after thinking there was plenty of space when I put them in the ground. They seem to grow so much the second year & I sure have moved my share of grasses due to this and hey, like I said, I thought I had plenty of space. The little rhyme goes like this:

1st year they sleep

2nd year they creep

3rd year they leap

More rain will make them bigger too. With all that May/June rain we got its like grasses on steroids this year so maybe next year they won't seem too close.

I'm psyching myself up to move a huge one coming up and will do some more editing later on. Now I have 3 new grasses I just got yesterday from SRG and I'm taking the yardstick out with me to plant them and adding a few inches. If that's not enough to worry about, I read 2 different mature sizes online so I am using the larger size to determine centers when I plant them.

Maybe so, it looked like a grass.

Here it is now with those grass like daylilies now moved elsewhere (right now in a bucket till I figure where to put them in the ground).

(And next year the border of annuals will be planted as close as possible to the stone edging providing a bit more space to these grasses)

I don't know, I just keep planting them too close together after thinking there was plenty of space when I put them in the ground.

Yup. Me too and most everyone else in this forum. ;)

Plenty of sunshine, maybe too much fert.

Mine have been blooming for months. All are in full, hot sun, with the exception of one and it is not blooming nearly as much as the others.

I have some volunteers too from a plant that didn't winter over. I tried moving a couple in late spring & they died after a few days so I left the rest, the roots weren't big because they were babies. Now they are fair sized plants that would look like a 4" pot size if I was buying them so still small enough to move. I'm leaning toward trying again in late winter/early spring right before they start growing. They start waking up early I've noticed in the past. Since I have more than one, I'm going to move one this fall to place I'd like to have it growing. They really don't like Oklahoma so I expect only a season or two. We treat them like short lived perennials down here.

Thanks for the comments. I guess I'll try to move them in the next several weeks, so they have the moist, cool months of fall to get acclimated. Now to decide where to put them. Hmmmmm.

I should have added on my earlier post that I did find one new one this year. It is called "Cleopatra" and is quite striking.

Pics won't load....frustrating!

Do you cut your delphiniums back after blooming in the spring? Mine are cut back the end of June/ first of July and rebloom in the fall.

I'm also in NJ and last year, for the very first time, I planted a Delphinum elatum. It bloomed late June just like yours (and is just about to bloom again.)

My guess - many nurseries dose plant with various chemicals to get them to bloom early because otherwise they won't sell. It's not unusual for me to go to one of my favorite nurseries and see a lot of things blooming that have no business blooming at that particular time.

I've grown what I believe is Lucifer for years. I got it from another local garden where it had been for even more years. So it has proven itself hardy here. However, it seems to be unique in hardiness.

I have Lucifer and Emily McKenzie, the E.M. has been hardy for me for at least 6 years, including the past 2 rather severe winters that hit -15 and prolonged very cold stretches, without unusual care (I do throw chopped leaves on all my beds in the fall). My only problem was when they started to get too much shade from an adjacent dogwood bush. My yard is very wet in later winter/early spring so they are in a raised bed amended with sand and compost etc. My gladiolus are also hardy here and reproducing under the same care/conditions.

Your plant looks pretty healthy to me! I have never added lime before so I can not say, I grow mine in a mixture with peat so it does add to the acidity and I have found they like that just fine! I have added bone meal and liquid seaweed in the springtime although I added it to them all, so if it did anything I did not have a 'control' group to see any difference! They just need moisture but well-drained soil!

OK thanks. I need to be patient. They are building roots.

Mulch will help with the weeds that arrive by seed, but in a thickly planted garden those usually aren't bad. I have some older, more established gardens that rarely get mulched because they don't need it for weeds. The plants themselves do a decent job of covering the ground and suppressing weeds.

Personally, I have never dealt with evening primrose, or bishop's weed, so I don't know just how bad they are to get rid of. The nuclear option is to pull all the other perennials out of the bed, cover the shrubs, and douse the whole thing with Round Up. Then you wait a couple of weeks for more weeds to appear and do it again, and repeat this all summer. This is what most people in this thread think you should do. It isn't easy, and is more disruptive than you want, but it does tend to work. (I have dealt with a bulbed weed that took two summers to get rid of, but you don't need to know that) A less disruptive option is to carefully apply RU to the leaves of the offending plants with a foam paintbrush, Ken's mustard bottle or some other kind of controlled applicator. This should kill the root structures, and all the offsets from those roots with fairly little collateral damage. This should be done while the weeds are actively growing, and isn't going to be a one-shot deal. It is going to be part of your normal weeding process for at least a year.

I don't think you've told us how big this garden is, or if the problem weeds are concentrated in one part, or spread throughout it. If they are in one area, then of course just pulling everything from that area is an option.

There really isn't a quick fix for a problem like this, and it isn't an off-season job. The weeds have to be tackled while they are growing, and that is when everything else is growing also.

Here are 2 photos to give you an idea of how dense this gets. I am looking forward to taking this on at the end of the gardening season so I don't lose my fancy annuals (datura, lisianthus), and yet address this while the weeds are still active. Thanks for that great idea about the foam brush/squirt bottle

I'm still still too lazy to do that seed-o-promise. I'm zone 7, maybe I will just start writing it in. I used to do that early on, I had put it up there with my name each time when I remembered to do it back in the old days.

Peren.all - you've convinced me - I will look for that campanula! :-)

I was able to take a close look at the flowers on my helenium this afternoon. The petals are definitely not tubular - although they do curl up in a U - so it's not the 'Loysder Wieck'. My guess then would be it's a seedling either from the Loysder I had, or from a neighbour across the street's plants - I'll have to take a look at what she's got growing there now....

Where are you located? I would love to take a road trip for a shade tolerant sunflower. Within reason, of course.

Martha

mmm, I fancy trying it with asters.