University Place

cc >> Horticulturist at Monches Farm in Colgate, Wisconsin. And how many of you have been to Monches Farm? Very nice. Thank you. I appreciate that. For those of you who haven't, we're about an hour drive from here, about 30 miles northwest of downtown Milwaukee. We've been growing perennials for 33 years now. We grow about 2,000 varieties of hardy field-grown perennials as well as unusual annuals and tropicals. We also have a gift shop with antiques, and we do custom dried floral design and that sort of thing. We're on a rustic designated Wisconsin Rustic Road. It's really a beautiful drive out there. So I'd love to have you come visit us sometime. We present our plants in kind of a unique way in that we plant, we pot up the plants, we sink the pot in the ground, and they stay in the ground there until they go home with a gardener. So our plants are all out there in the sales yard now. We do cover them with straw for the winter months. As soon as things thaw in the spring, we'll be raking the straw off, and you will know that plant has already been through a Wisconsin winter when you take it home to your garden. So what we're going to be talking about today is common mistakes beginning perennial gardeners make and how to avoid them. And I hate to start with soil because I know that for so many people soil is just a snoozer, and you kind of lose people right from the get-go. But it is absolutely the foundation of developing a good perennial garden. And it's one of the few mistakes that you can't easily go back and correct after the fact. So in planning you garden, it really makes sense to get the soil prepared correctly because you're going to have such a more satisfactory experience. No matter how wonderful the plants are that you put into your garden, if you don't have good soil, you're not going to have success and it's not going to be a good experience for you. So, how do you go about figuring out how to amend the soil? First you want to know what your existing soil is. And the soil is determined by the underlying bedrock. And the fact that we have had glaciation in southern Wisconsin really makes that kind of a complicated situation. I live in West Bend, and on the south side of town the soil is very clay and loam and on the north side of town it's very sandy. So don't assume that your soil is the same as your friend or your neighbor just because they live in you proximity. It really, soil types can vary greatly within a very small locality because of the glaciation. The basic types of soil that you'll find in this area are sandy soil, which these things are sort of obvious, but the soil particles are very large so the roots can grow very readily through them. Plants actually love to grow in sand and grow very well in sand. The problem is that nutrients and moisture passes very readily through sandy soil. So you need to constantly be supplementing those if you're growing in a real sandy soil. On the opposite extreme, you have the clay soil, which has very small soil particles, tends to hold water, and tends to become very waterlogged. It's also very difficult for roots to penetrate, particularly when it dries. It can become almost like concrete. But it is a more nutrient rich soil than the sandy soil. And the way that you would take either of these extremes and make them into the ideal garden soil, which is loam, would be by adding organic matter. Either to clay soil or to sandy soil, the addition of organic matter is going to give you your desirable end soil, which is loam. Some people think if you take a clay soil and you add sand that makes it drain more readily. In fact, it doesn't. It actually worsens the situation. So if you are going to bring in new soil, and this is what we often do with our beds. I don't know if I have a pointer on here or not. I don't think I do. But we prepare the garden bed, and then we actually bring in and berm up with introduced soil. And if you're purchasing soil, you want to make sure you don't buy just what is often called brown topsoil or black topsoil because a lot of times you're going to just be buying in what you already have as your native soil. So you really want to buy in a blended mix. And if you are working with a reputable dealer and you tell them what you're after, they can help you pick out what that mix is. It's going to vary depending upon who the distributor is. But, basically, you want soil that's actually mixed with some sort of organic matter, some sort of compost. We sometimes actually start with a plant starter mix, which is usually used for nurseries, to establish our beds. And if you are going to be adding to your existing soil, you want to bring in organic matter. And we have found that the absolute best compost we can purchase is what's called mushroom compost. And in the Milwaukee area, we get it from a place called Certified Products in New Berlin, but I'm sure it's available other places also. It is just phenomenal stuff. If you mix your organic matter with your native soil about one-third to two-thirds, you till that in, you just get amazing performance from your plants. If you want to know what you have in terms of nutrient content and that sort of thing in your existing soil, the best thing to do is to take a soil sample. And because the soil can really vary even within your own piece of property, you usually are going to want to take a number of soil samples from throughout your property and submit them to the UW Soil Testing Lab. I didn't print out handouts for today, but all this information, you don't have to write down these websites and stuff because all this information is available on our website, MonchesFarm.com. If you go to the latest news page, there's a link to a three- or four-page handout that has all this information on it that you can print out. So if you send your soil into the UW Soil Testing Lab, they're going to tell you what the nutrient content is, what the pH is, and what they would recommend in terms of additions. And there are many, many soil nutrients, but the three that are considered the primary nutrients because they are most used by plants and they move most readily through the soil and therefore are the ones that you most frequently have to supplement are nitrogen, phosphorus, and potassium. And when you see a fertilizer bag and it has the three numbers, 10, 10, 10 or 10, 25, or whatever, those are what the three numbers are. The first number is nitrogen, the second number is phosphorus, and the last number is potassium. The nitrogen tends to push a lot of leafy growth. So that's why lawn fertilizers will have a high first number. If you're emphasis is on growing fruit or on trying to produce blossoms, usually you're looking for a higher middle number because the phosphorus is what affects that type of growth. Although, our native soils in Wisconsin do tend to naturally be quite high in phosphorus. And the potassium just sort of is for overall plant health. Soil pH is another consideration. This, just like the soil type, is determined by the underlying bedrock. So again, in southern Wisconsin where we have limestone, our soils tend to be very alkaline. You get a little bit more acidity in the northern part of the state. And this affects the type of plants you grow. Plants that like to grow in a more acidic soil, just a couple examples here, rhododendron and blueberries, are unable to pick up the nutrients they need out of a more alkaline soil. So they do not tend to thrive. And that's why these plants you'll struggle to succeed with. Another thing, and many people have some awareness of this but maybe a little bit of misunderstanding of the plants that are influenced, sometimes the flower color can be influenced by soil pH. In very, very few plants the big leaf hydrangeas or the Hydrangea macrophylla, which are the ones that can produce the blue flower heads, those ones will change color depending upon the soil acidity. They'll be blue in acid soil; they'll be pink in alkaline soil. And that's why oftentimes if you buy one of these at the nursery and it's blue when you get it, it may be pink in future years, if it blooms at all, quite frankly, because many of them don't tend to be bud hardy here. But that does not apply to the other two species of hydrangea that you frequently see. The snowball type, Hydrangea arborescens and the Hydrangea paniculata, which is the fall blooming one. Those two, they're going to be white, fading to green or rose color regardless of the soil acidity. But a lot of people want to try to grow blueberries or they want to try to get that blue hydrangea color, and you can supplement the soils with aluminum sulfate to make them more acidic. But I really think probably the best approach is to grow plants that are better adapted the growing in the soil that you actually have. You're almost fighting a losing battle to try to be constantly changing the soil pH around that plant. It can be done, but it's sort of a short-term fix. So moving on from soils, putting a garden or a plant in the wrong place. So the solution to this, obviously, you want to evaluate your site and you want to research your plant selection. Your site considerations would be number one, which we already talked about. The soil type, the pH, and the nutrient content. The sun exposure, the moisture levels, and then what I'm calling special considerations. So, sun exposure, a lot of people say I don't have full sun in that spot, thinking that full sun means that there is not one bit of shade, it's blasting sun all day. Full sun for a plant really means five or more hours of sun a day. So you have a lot more versatility than I think a lot of people think and think they're restricted to shade plants if they don't have that really truly full sun all day. If you have five or more hours, that is full sun as far as the plant is concerned. And three to five hours, partial shade, two to three hours, shade, and zero to two hours is dense shade. And you really also want to consider the source of the shade. If you're underneath a tree, depending upon the density of the canopy cover, underneath a locust tree, there may be dappled light throughout the day down there. Underneath a maple tree, it's quite dense, but the worst shade to try to deal with is that that's cast by structures or by buildings. So on the north side of the house, there may literally be no sun that ever hits that spot, and that certainly becomes a challenge in plant selection. Moisture levels, drainage issues, and access to water. There may be an area, certainly this has to do with your soil type also, but if there's an area that floods in the spring, you're going to want to have plants that can tolerate that, being submerged for some period of time. If there's an area that's very dry, a slope that drains really quickly. But lastly, and I think some people don't think about this, access to water. How readily can you get your hose to that spot? It's a lot easier to water plants that are right in your foundation planting, but if you're going to put your perennial garden way at the back of your property, you're going to have to put three lengths of hose on in order to get to it, you're probably not going to water it as frequently as you really need to. So think about access to water also. And special considerations could be many, many things, but some of the most prominent that I run into, number one, high winds. We do tend to get a lot of high winds running across what used to be the prairie here in southern Wisconsin. So plants that have sort of tender stems that might not withstand those winds, you want to have sturdy stem perennials for a windy site or possibly some sort of screening. Areas where kids or dogs are running. If there's going to be a lot of foot traffic, you definitely are going to want to pick plants that can take a little bit of abuse. And salt runoff, if it's next to a walkway or a driveway and you're going to have salt running off, you really want to consider, number one, there are products that you can use, different alternatives for deicing besides salt. But if you are going to be using salt, you may want to select plants for those areas that have higher salt tolerance. And we do have a number of special use lists on our website, again MonchesFarm.com. It's a this and that page, and I did put a link to that page on our latest news section also. If you want to access some of these lists, these are lists of plants that are salt tolerant, plants that are drought tolerant, plants that will grow in a wet site, perennials. Another common mistake is planting invasive plants. How many of you know what the plant is that's in that picture? Well, this is what's called Lysimachia clethroides or gooseneck loosestrife. Now, we all know of the pink loosestrife as an invasive plant, actually illegal to grow in this state. That's Lycknis salicaria. It's actually a completely unrelated plant, but they just happen to have the same common name, and we're going to talk about botanical nomenclature later also. But this is a beautiful plant. It has that kind of gooseneck shaped flower. It's really very pretty lovely cut flower. And when I was first introduced to this plant, I was told, oh, it's so great because it weaves the garden together. Well, indeed it does.

LAUGHTER

And I think a lot of times people, when they start out gardening, they're really drawn to some of these plants that tend to be invasive. And I think there's a couple reasons for that. Number one, a lot of times beginning gardeners start out by obtaining their plants at plant exchanges. And there's a lot of nice plants at plant exchanges, but you really need to be knowledgeable about what you're acquiring there because a lot of times the reason the plant is at the plant exchange is because that person had a whole bunch of it in their yard. And so a lot of times there's some not really great plants at those plant exchanges. Plus, when you come into the nursery and the plant that most appeals to you is the one that just looks so gorgeous and big and full and healthy in the pot, well, again, those oftentimes are the plants that are very aggressive. And these are kind of the catch words you'll want to look for in signage or in catalogs are vigorous, enthusiastic, or eager. You might want to steer away from those plants.

LAUGHTER

And this plant that we're seeing here in the pot, this is taken at Monches Farm. This is a plant that we sell. It is actually a plant that I really like. It's called a mountain mint, Pycnanthemum. It's actually a native prairie plant. But you see what it's doing. It's trying to leap out of the pot, and you can see that's how it's going to grow. Many members of the mint family do grow this way. So it's a fine plant, but you need to have an awareness going in of what the behavior of that plant is going to be and do you want that in that site. There are two kinds of plants that can be invasive. One are plants that run from the roots like this, and the other are plants that seed. And I actually find the plants that seed a little easier to deal with because if you get in there and you dead-head them, you don't have so much of that issue. Plus, you can pull out the seedlings. These ones that run can really be terrible because they get into your other perennials and they're coming up 20 feet away and I have a little more of a problem with those. But just as with the plant exchanges, be a little bit cautious about generous neighbors who are sharing things with you because oftentimes it's the plants that they have way too much of. And when you go to the nursery, try to shop at nurseries that have knowledgeable staff that can help you with your plant selection. And there's lots of wonderful nurseries represented here at the Garden Expo so it's a great starting point.

Another mistake

buying all of your plants at once and not remembering about the change of seasons. And I see this a lot. People come in, they decide they're going to put in a perennial garden so they come in in May, and they buy all the really pretty plants in May. Well, what are you going to pick? You're going to pick all the plants that are blooming in May. So you're going to have a really nice garden in May, you might have a nice garden going into June, but there's absolutely nothing going on in July, August, September, October. Most perennials, in exchange for them living year to year, bloom for two to three weeks. Some of them will bloom as long as six weeks. Those are the really long blooming ones. So you really have to make sure you're selecting plants that are going to be blooming over the course of the entire season. And here's just looking at the same garden in different seasons to see how things change over the course of the season. You want something going on throughout the season. So, how do you get away from that mistake? Number one, give yourself a few years to build your garden. You don't have to plant it all that first year. That way you can experiment with plants. You can buy one or two of this. And ideally they say, well, you want to have sweeps of plants. You want to have three or five. That's fine and ultimately that's true, but I think when you're really starting out it's not a bad idea to buy one of these, one of these. Put them in, see how they grow in your area, see how you like them, and see how they thrive and if you want to add to them. So do give yourself a number of years. Allow yourself to fill in the empty spaces with annuals those first years. Sometimes people, and I'm going to talk about this too, they're very purist. No, we only want perennials; we don't want any annuals. Well, some annuals really are very flamboyant, and they necessarily partner better with some of the more subtle beauty of perennials. But there are a lot of really nice more sort of understated annuals that will combine nicely with your perennial garden. So think about filling in your spaces those first few years with those annuals. Shop throughout the year. So go to the nursery in May, but go again in June. Go again in July. Go once a month, once every six weeks, and buy a couple of plants that are blooming during each visit so that you know you're going to have something blooming every month of the year in your garden. This will only work if you go to a nursery that's actually, like Monches or any other higher quality perennial nursery, where they're actually kind of growing the plants in situ and you're being able to see how they behave. If you go to the Kmart, you don't know. They brought that stuff in. You don't know if it's actually blooming on its regular schedule, etc. And, excellent, go to garden tours and botanic gardens. Botanic gardens are great because they have a lot of signage with a lot of information. But garden tours are possibly the best because you're, at a botanic gardens they have paid staff that are out there taking care of the plants. They're obviously going to look their best. When you go to another home gardener on a garden tour, you're seeing what's actually growing in a home gardener's backyard in your area, and what's looking good. You can talk to the person about their experience. Garden tours are really fantastic. And we do publish a list every summer of garden tours in the Milwaukee area on our website. And include bulbs. Bulbs are a great way to extend the season to the extremes in both directions. Starting as early as March with things like the snowdrops. And this is called glory of the snow. This also oftentimes comes right up through the snow in March and April. A couple of scenes we're going to look at here where you think what would you be looking at in that garden if those bulbs weren't there. And the answer is nothing. It would just be brown earth. So here are the winter aconites and the Puschkinia. This is probably early April. And this whole area that you see there, that's all Corydalis bulbosa. It's a bulbous type of Corydalis. Many of you may be familiar with the yellow blooming one. This one has a lavender flower. Most of these bulbs then go very quickly dormant. So they're completely gone by the time your perennials come up. So they just give you a whole other season of color. Another advantage to these really early season bulbs is that this area, the leaves aren't out on the trees yet. So this area will be a shaded area during the growing season, but it's sun in the spring. So you can get a lot of color very, very early in the season in what you might think of as your shade garden where you're not thinking you can get a lot of color because it's sun at the time of year when these plants are actively growing. And again, just think of that scene if you didn't have that bulb there. It would just be brown earth. Crocuses, of course, we're all familiar with. Now, going to the other end of the season. This is surprise lily. It has a number of interesting common names. Surprise lily, resurrection lily, naked ladies. What it does is it comes up in the spring with green strap-like foliage, which many people don't even notice. They don't even know the plant has leaves because it's at a time there's a lot of other things going on in the garden. And then in the fall, late summer, early fall, it has these tall stems that come up with these amaryllis type flowers. And just as with the early season bulbs, this will grow in quite a bit of shade. And it's just really a fun plant. And it's nice to have, sometimes the gardens are starting to look a little tired as you get later in the season. It's nice to have something fresh and new coming up that late in the season. This would be August into September. And it partners, because it will grow in the shade, it partners real well with hostas, and if you interplant it with hostas, it will come up through the hosta foliage, and we do have a beautiful big hosta at the farm with one of these planted underneath it. And people are always asking us in the autumn what that variety of hosta is.

LAUGHTER

Another mistake

And another one that's really, really late, this is well into October, is the Colchicum. It's often called autumn crocus, but it's not in fact a true crocus. Again, it comes up with the green leaves in the spring, and then those die down. There's nothing there in the summer so you might want to mark this and make sure you're not putting your spade through it. But this plant just has these beautiful, and they're large. The flowers are about this big. So they look like a crocus, but they're quite large. And they're really spectacular at that time of year when everything else is kind of slowing down and getting ready to quit and this is coming up fresh and new. A couple years ago I had a gal come in and she said, you know, I'm really disappointed in you guys. I can't believe that you have artificial flowers out in the garden.

LAUGHTER

Another mistake

And this is a double blooming form called waterlily.

A mistake

not checking the hardiness zones. The USDA plant hardiness zone. Each plant is given a rating in what zones it's hardy in. Basically, we in this area are, in Madison you're probably four and in Milwaukee we're five. So you want to know is that plant hardy to that zone. We write all of our own signage at the farm, and we do try to indicate the hardiness, but some plants, and we grow most of our plants, but some plants we do buy because we can't get these great, big tropical plants. We can't grow those to maturity in a financially realistic way in our climate. So we buy in a lot of these tropicals from the west coast. And they come in with tags in the pot. They're oftentimes a picture tag, so we'll leave that tag in there. And the customers will read it and it will say perennial on it because it is perennial in California where it was grown. But if you look closely, those tags will also, they always will have the zone on them. And it will say perennial zone eight. Well, then you know it's not going to be perennial here. But that's a really common mistake people make, especially when you're shopping at the big box stores. You see the tag, it says perennial, and so you think it's a perennial. Well, it is, but it's not perennial in Wisconsin in zone four or five.

Mistake

weeding out perennial plants and nurturing weeds. With perennials it can be challenging because they're not blooming all the time like an annual. You do have to kind of learn what they look like and know that's a desirable plant. That's another advantage of building your garden a little bit slowly rather than putting everything in all at once. If you take your time, you put a little bit of this and a little bit of that, you kind of get to know those plants as you grow with them. But there are other ways you can deal with this. A really good solution is labeling plants. Labeling your perennials as you put them in. If you're planting a number of them, label at least one so that you know that plant that looks like that is supposed to be there. And there's a number of ways to label plants. You can just put the little plastic tag that came with them in their pot in the ground next to them. That will work, certainly for the first season. But we really like these zinc garden labels. And there's a number of ways to use them. What I like best are these little handheld label makers. They're basically like a miniature laser printer. And if you get the clear label with black on them and then they have an adhesive on the back, you'll get a label that looks like this here. It's a really professional looking label, and many of them, these can last up to a decade. They really last forever. If you have a laser printer at home, you can print these on your computer. But most of us have inkjet printers. If you have an inkjet printer, as soon as it gets wet that will run off. You can also write on these zinc tags with any type of permanent marker, whether it be a Sharpie or a paint pen. They have permanent pencils. But no matter what you use to write on them, they always fade on the front. So what we do if we're going to have to write on them, we write on the back too so that once that front fades, you've still got it written on the back, you know what it is, you can rewrite it on the front again. And then you may want to know what the five or six most problematic weeds in your area are. I could have a whole talk on Wisconsin weeds, but the only one I'm going to specifically talk about is the garlic mustard. The garlic mustard is a biennial plant, meaning that the first, it lives for two years, the first year it puts up its foliage, does not bloom. The second year it comes up, then it blooms, sets seed, and the cycle starts over again. It's a very, very problematic plant in Wisconsin and throughout the Midwest. It's completely wiping out some of our native woodland vegetation areas. So if you have it on your property, you do need to make an effort to get rid of it. When it's in the vegetative state the first year, you can apply herbicide to it. Although it does require frequent applications. A single application won't kill it. Or you can pull it. When it's in the blooming year, when it's in the second year, you need to pull it and you can't, even if you pull it real early before the flowers have all set, it's very adaptable. That's usually how weeds become weeds. They're very adaptable. It can set seed, if you pull that plant and through it aside to dry, it looks like it's dead, it still can set viable seed. So you need to bag and remove these plants. Either burn them or bag them and get them off the property. The garbage men will take them. You do need to label them invasive plant material, and they'll take your black bags of these. So don't pull it and throw it on the ground the way you can with most weeds. It was introduced intentionally, as many weeds and exotic animals that become problematic are, because it's an herb. It has a garlic flavor to it. You can eat it. It's actually quite tasty. So if you want to harvest it in its first year stage when the leaves are young, just as you would want to harvest most edible plants, in an area on your property that you know has not been sprayed with herbicides, you can make a great pesto out of it. And we have a recipe on our website, again on the This and That page. Then if you want to have an idea what some of the other really common weeds are, there's lots of great websites out there. I just did a quick search and this is one that I found that I thought was very well done for identifying weeds. It's the National Gardening Association. Again, all this information is on the handout. >> Which handout? >> The handout that you can find on our website.

And mistake

not considering native wildlife. We have, I imagine you have it here, certainly in the Milwaukee area, a tremendous problem with deer. And rabbits vary from year to year. Their population really is very cyclic. Down in the bottom is some tulips. We don't do tulips at all anymore because they're such a good plant. They're really, really tasty. And we've even had customers that have had their dogs dig up their tulip bulbs and eat them because they really are good.

LAUGHTER

And mistake

The solution is planting deer and rabbit resistant plants. And you'll find a list, again on our website, on the this and that page, but as a basic rule of thumb, the plants that the deer and rabbits don't like to eat are plants with silver foliage, plants that are very highly scented, so most herbs or members of the mint family they will not like to eat. As a general rule, they don't eat Allium, the ornamental onions, although we have had years when they have done that, and plants that are toxic. And those are the ones you probably wouldn't know off the top of your head so it's handy to have a list of those things like the Digitalis or foxglove, the Helleborus, the lenten rose, the Aconitum are plants that are actually toxic, and the animals know that and they don't eat them. If there are certain plants you love and you want to grow despite the fact that you know that deer like to eat them, then you might want to consider spraying repellents. Most repellents that are on the market are effective, but they have to be reapplied frequently. Most of them tend to be rather on the expensive side, and the active ingredient, if you will, in most of them is egg. So you can actually make a very effective deer repellent yourself for free. And this recipe, again, is on the handout. But it's just eggs, milk, oil, and used hot chili oil just as that extra taste deterrent, and dishwashing liquid which makes it stick to the foliage. You have to let that ferment. What I do is I save the empty milk carton with just that little bit of milk in the bottom, add the rest of the ingredients, and just fill it up with water, set it some place to become fragrant for a week or so, and then I screen it through a little sieve and then I put a nylon stocking or something on the sieve and pour that into my sprayer so you don't get any lumps that are going to clog up your sprayer. It smells really terrible, but that's the idea. And it's very effective, and it usually lasts a couple of weeks. It does last through rain. Deer are deterred mostly by scent, rabbits more by taste. So it's the hot pepper element that is effective for the rabbits. So if it's rabbits you're trying to get rid of or trying to discourage, then you want to make sure and include that hot pepper element.

Mistake

being too much of a purist. I kind of touched on this before with I only want to do perennials, I don't want to have any annuals. A lot of times people will come in starting out, they only want pastel flowers. That's very, very common with beginner gardeners. They don't want any yellow, any orange. And a lot of the longest blooming plants, actually a lot of the longest blooming perennials do have yellow flowers. And when I start, I was a huge daylily collector for many, many years. And at one point I had about 400 varieties of daylilies in my garden, and I wanted all the pastels. That's what I wanted. I wanted cream and pink and lemon, and somebody gave me as a gift an orange daylily. And I thought, oh, but I put it in my garden and I found I kept looking at that place where that orange daylily was. That's where my eye was drawn. And then I shifted, and now I have a lot of those really vibrant colors because they really add a lot of zing to the garden. If you just have a garden that's all pastels, it's not exciting. It's not fun. And also, all white. So many have all white. They can't have anything that's not white. So be creative. Let yourself experiment and try some other things. Don't lock yourself in to what your original idea may have been. needing to have the latest new thing and believing everything you read.

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Mistake

Horticulture, marketing of horticultural plants has changed dramatically over the last 10 or 15 years. And now there's many, many plants on the market now that are patented so that every purchase of that plant the originator gets a portion of the proceeds. So there's incentive for constantly introducing new plants and patenting them and marketing them. And what happens as a result is that a lot of the really great old time plants get crowded out of the market because people are clamoring for the plants that are seen advertised all the time. And there's multimillion dollar advertising campaigns for some of these plants now. So have an awareness of that, and do realize too that they think the gardener wants something new so they're going to try to be constantly introducing something new. And many of these plants are not necessarily better. And a lot of times there will be a lot of noise made about a new plant that comes on the market, and they tend to be very expensive when they first come out. I say wait. You don't need to have it the first year. Let you neighbor or your friend be the first one to have it, and then watch and see what happens because a lot of these plants, they're not even around three years later. They just disappear because they don't turn out to be really good garden performers. So, be patient and be a little skeptical. How do you know when you read about some plant that's supposed to be great how much of a grain salt you should take what you're reading with? Well, there are some organizations, this is the Wisconsin Nursery Association. Well, their goal, obviously, is to sell plants. We want you to buy plants. That's what we do for business. But we also want you to buy a really good plant that you're going to love and be successful with so you come back and buy more. And so the Wisconsin Nursery Association each year picks a perennial plant of the year and a woody plant of the year, and these tend to be really fantastic plants. Their selections are excellent. So any plants that an organization like this is promoting do tend to be something that's worth considering. And we do have a list of the Wisconsin perennial plants of the year on our website. Also, the Perennial Plant Association, which is a national organization of perennial plant growers, each year select a perennial plant of the year. Their criteria are suitable for a wide range of climatic conditions, low maintenance requirements, relatively pest and disease resistant, ready availability in the year promotion and multiple seasons or ornamental interest. Those are all great goals, and I would say for the most part the plants that they select really meet those qualifications. And the perennial plant of the year are usually really, really good choices. And, again, you'll find a list on our website of those plants. The All American Selections, the difference between the All American Selections and the other two we just talked about is the other two they can pick from any plant. These could have been plants that have been on the market for years and years. All American Selections do tend to be, they're new introductions. The grower will provide these plants for evaluation. But they're being evaluated in a very objective way. It's an independent nonprofit organization that does not advertise. And they're putting them through these trials. So where do you go to see these trials? You can actually go and look at these plants being trialed at these various locations nearby. And it's really very interesting because you can go and they'll have a huge bed of all different Salvias or all different petunias or whatever it might be. And you can compare them yourself and see which ones are blooming most heavily, which ones are sprawling all over the places, which ones have nicer habit. It's really nice to have these trial gardens open to the public. And then the American Garden Award, and usually these, at like Boerner Botanic Gardens in Milwaukee, these trials are there, and you can actually vote. As a visitor to the gardens, you can vote, and you're determining which ones are going to be getting the award. Now, on the flip side of that is the Proven Winners program.

You see the wording here

Proven Winners is the leading brand. And their reason for existence is they want to have unique high performing plants, but they want to market the plants. And so it's a brand, and this is what we receive in the mail from the Proven Winners program. Expect your customers to ask for blah, blah, blah, whatever it might be because we're going to advertise it. And they spend a lot of money advertising these plants. And sometimes it can be difficult to tell the difference between advertising and editorials. So just maybe try to look carefully when you see something in a woman's magazine, a big full-page thing about a plant, is it an ad or is it actually an article? And if it's an ad, maybe let that plant prove itself before you go out and invest a lot of money in it for your garden.

Mistake

not using botanical nomenclature. What is botanical nomenclature? It's binomial nomenclature, meaning bi, which is two, and nomen is name. So every plant has a common name, like we were talking about the loosestrife, where there are two plants that both have the common name loosestrife, but they're completely unrelated plants. So one is Lythrum salicaria; the other is Lysimachia clethroides. They each have a genus and a species name. And to understand how that works, a genus would be like the equivalent of your last name. So if you're Alice Smith, everybody in the Smith family may share certain characteristics that you can tell that's a Smith. But you're Alice Smith, that's the specific name or the species name. That describes you exactly. Alice Smith is the only person that fits that exact description. And so if you know the genus and the species name, you know that you're asking for exactly the right plant. If you read about some plant or if you go on a garden tour, oh, I really like that, and they say, oh, well that's a cupflower or something. Well, can you tell me, do you have any more information than that? Do you know the scientific name? Because if you go to the nursery and you ask for the cupflower, who knows what that is. You're going to know exactly what you're talking about if you have the genus and the species. And just the genus isn't going to do it because say this is Phlox. Well, there's all different types of Phlox ranging from the tall garden Phlox to low Creeping Phlox. Well, say okay, it was a Creeping Phlox. Well, there's two entirely different plants that are called Creeping Phlox. The one on the top is Phlox stolonifera, that's a woodland ground cover. And the one on the bottom is Phlox subulata. That's a rock garden plant for full sun. They're both called Creeping Phlox. Just to complicate the issue, the one on the bottom is also called Pinks, and Pinks is the common name for Dianthus or carnations. So that's why it really does behoove you to know these scientific names. And when you get down to the species level, so that's Phlox paniculata, the tall garden Phlox, that species name can actually tell you information about the plant itself. It's usually in a language you don't know. It's either Greek or it's Latin usually. But you can learn what some of these names mean, and it actually tells you some characteristics of the plant. So in this situation, Phlox paniculata means the flower, it flowers in a panicle. The flower is in the form of a panicle. But alba is white. Atropurpurea would be purple. It can even tell you about the growing conditions. Let's see palustris, if the species name is palustris, that wants to grow in a wet area. Most of them are just descriptive, the other ones that are on there. But you really can get a lot of information out of the name. It can be quite interesting to begin to understand what these names mean. So you've narrowed it down to Phlox paniculata, even if you went into the nursery and said I want Phlox paniculata, there's probably well over a hundred different varieties of Phlox paniculata. So you really want to know also the cultivar or the variety name. In this case, Phlox paniculata, Shockwave. That's this variegated one. But there's any number of named varieties of cultivar, which means it's a variety that was developed by plant breeders is what a cultivar is. It's shown in single quotes like that. selecting a plant solely on the basis of its flowers. We all do this. It's just human nature. But it really, and this is another reason that it's good to sort of take your time establishing your perennial garden and maybe not invest in huge waves of one thing until you find out how you like its performance. You also want to consider what its foliage, habit, form, and texture is going to be because the vast majority of the time, other than that three to four weeks that the plant is blooming, that's what you're going to be looking at. You're going to be looking at the foliage and the habit and the texture and the form. And so you want that to be attractive. And there are a lot of perennials that really are very attractive through the whole season even though they're not blooming. One of my favorites is this. This is a dwarf form of the Baptisia australis or false indigo called minor. And it has a really pretty flower in the spring, but then also it just has that beautiful habit throughout the season. It's just a really good garden plant. If you are going to pick plants based on their flower, you might want to select those that are going to bloom for a really long period of time. And there are some perennials that will bloom six weeks, even more, but they are few and far between. We do have a list on our website of perennials that bloom more than six weeks, but the one on the right here, this is Salvia verticillata, purple rain. That is a great Salvia. If you dead-head that, that blooms all season. It's a different species than the Salvia most of you are probably familiar with. At the top, that's Corydalis lutea. We saw in an earlier slide that Corydalis bulbosa. That was that carpet of purple early in the spring. That one goes dormant. This one blooms in deep shade in soil with no nutrients from June until hard frost. It's one of the longest blooming perennials. >> What was it called again? >> It's Corydalis lutea. In the middle, that's Calamintha, Montrose White. That picture was taken in late October. That's been blooming since June. And you want to be a little careful with the Calamintha because you only want to get the sterile varieties. Montrose White and there's a blue one called nepetoides, subspecies nepetoides. Those are the sterile ones. Some of the other varieties, well we learned the hard way, Blue Cloud and White Cloud, they seed all over the place. And then the plant on the left that's Nepeta, Souvenir d'Andre. And Nepeta, Souvenir d'Andre Chaudron, and it's one of my very, very favorite plants. It blooms all summer. Hummingbirds love it. We can't get it anymore. We can't find it anywhere. Fortunately, we do have some stock we're going to be able to take cuttings from. But the wholesaler that we used to buy it from, they said we got rid of it because it had too long of a name.

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Mistake

And then, of course, the plant that it's partnered with there is a really great plant that blooms all year.

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Mistake

And it grows in sun or shade, and it doesn't even require watering.

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And mistake

falling for a picture of a pretty face. I did take these pictures off the Internet, and I don't want to imply that these are not great daylilies because I don't know anything about these particular daylilies. But what I did is I just looked for really incredible looking daylilies. And if you saw that picture in a catalog, you would say, wow, I want to have that. But what do you really know about it besides that's what one flower looks like? And there's so much more to know about a plant. And we do grow about 400 varieties of daylilies at the farm. So if you can go and you can actually see that plant, ideally in a garden situation, and this is where going to the botanic gardens or going to the garden tours is great too, you're going to see not just the individual flower but you're going to see how many flowers are on that plant, how well branched are they, how are they distributed on the plant, what does the foliage look like, etc, etc. All these things that are really important considerations for having an attractive and satisfying garden plant. And so that is what I have to show you in terms of the slides. And thank you very much.

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