University Place

>> Good afternoon. I am Jackie Askins with UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and this afternoon Lisa Johnson is going to talk to us a little bit about planting perennials for the sun and the shade. Lisa is the Dane County Cooperative Extension horticulture educator. So please welcome Lisa. >> Thanks very much for inviting me. It's great to be here. So, perennials are really one of my very favorite things. I spend a lot of time doing perennial gardening and weeding, well, I guess that's part of gardening, during the summer. So I'm really happy to share my passion for perennial plants with you. So when I talk to master gardeners or other audiences about perennials, it's kind of a multifaceted thing. There are a lot of decisions that go into choosing a perennial, and then once you have made your choice and matched your plant to your environment, then there's all of the maintenance. There's the making sure you planted it properly in the first place, proper watering, how do you propagate the plant and fertilization and then choosing some really good plants. So the beginning of the talk is sort of more plant culture based and the end of the talk I will go through a number of my favorite plants. Now, there are thousands of perennials out there, particularly when you start looking at all the varieties of daylilies and hostas that are available. So if your favorite plant isn't in here, I apologize. These are just some that I think work particularly well in Wisconsin, and I have tried to structure this talk so that we have some plants that will work in different areas of the state. If there-- when we start talking about winter heartiness, for example, that will give you a good clue as to which of these plants will work in what areas of the state. Okay, so the first thing I want to just kind of start out by giving you an idea of things that I look for when I'm shopping. I try not to be an impulsive shopper, but it's really hard in terms of plants. But if you're looking for perennials, of course, the first qualification to make it a perennial, is it going to survive the darn winter? And so, winter heartiness is a big issue, and when I get into a little further into the presentation, I will show you what I mean by winter heartiness. It's not just cold. There are a lot of things that go into what makes a plant winter hearty. Then there's colorful foliage. Now, I'm not advocating that every single plant in your garden should be purple or orange or pink or have really colorful foliage like that, but sprinkling a few of these plants in amongst the green really does help to add a lot of excitement and visual interest. And let's be honest, perennial plants only flower for a particular period of time. They're not like annuals that are going to flower the whole season. We do have some perennials that have a longer flowering season than others, but many of them are only going to last two or three weeks. So when they're done flowering, what are you left with? You're left with the leaves. So if you don't have any interesting looking leaves, your garden can be kind of boring unless you plant some annuals in with those perennials. So that's what I'm getting at with that structural and textural interest. I like to mix it up. I like to have some plants that have bold, broad kind of tropical looking leaves next to plants that have lacy, highly dissected leaves, using plants that have tall grass-like foliage and plants that have more clumping habit, mixing all those textures and colors next to each other really helps add a lot to your perennial garden. Again, there are some plants that have long bloom. Coreopsis in particular is one of the longer bloomers, a lot of the shasta daisies also have a long blooming season. The cone flowers have a long blooming season and some of the Veronicas. So, you can choose plants that-- particularly if you're a busy person like me that I never have as much time to garden as I want. I like to choose plants that are somewhat low maintenance and that have a long blooming period to give me the biggest bang for my buck. Disease or insect resistance. How many of you have suffered with powdery mildew on your phlox or on your monarda or bee balm? I don't even buy plants that are not disease resistant, so when I'm looking at a cultivar of monarda, for example, I will look on the tag to see if it says disease resistant because I don't like the look of powdery mildew, and I don't like spray fungicides either. Then, plants that are tolerant of different soil types. A lot of us that live in urban areas or suburban areas have actually lots of little micro climates. There are areas in my yard, for example, where I have heavy clay. Then there's another area where for some reason it's more sandy. And then there's a lot of the yard that has pretty much acceptable average sort of clay loam types of soil. So my rule of thumb with perennials is that I don't give up on them until I've killed them in three different places. And it's-- if it doesn't work in one soil area, I try it in another one, and if I've tried it in all three, and it still dies, then I figure it must be a winter heartiness issue and not a soil issue. Again, low maintenance. There are some perennials such as delphiniums. I love delphiniums, but they need staking, which is a pain in the tookus. They need fertilizing, which is also kind of a pain if you have to do it a couple of times a year. There are a little bit intolerant of higher pH soil so you might need to add some sulfur. So I don't have too many recommendations for delphiniums because they are a little bit of a diva plant, and I may have some diva plants in this talk, but generally I try and recommend the more bullet proof things. And then finally, the issue of garden thugs. Making sure that your perennial plays well with others. There are, unfortunately, some garden thugs out there. One of my master gardeners brought me in one the other day, and said, "What is this thing? I just bought this house." It turns out it's gooseneck loosestrife which is a very aggressive plant. Obedient plant can be very aggressive. Even monarda can be aggressive in certain situations. So to save yourself time, it's a good idea to look into getting plants that are going to play well with others. If you see on the tag the word vigorous or spreads or aggressive, usually don't put aggressive because it's not a good selling point, but those other two terms are a really good clue that this plant may not play well with others and that you better keep an eye on it. Also if you see a lot of roots coming out of the underside of the pot and they look really robust, that may be a plant that spreads by underground rhizomes and is also going to be a little bit of an issuse for you. So I said I'd talk about winter heartiness. The USDA has put together a map for the entire U.S. that has different what we call heartiness zones. Now, down South, they have heat zones. Down here, we have cold zones. And what these zones are is they are an average of a five degree range of typical cold temperatures. So back when I was an undergraduate, and I'm not going to tell you how long ago that was, but Madison used to be zone 4B, and our 4B temperatures were minus 25 to minus 20. Due to climate change that has been refigured by the USDA. About every 30 years, they look at the average temperatures, and they redo the map. And so this latest map which is actually only about five years old, now has us in 5A. The one before this, areas like Mount Horeb or other areas outside of Madison were considered still 4B. This new map has them in 5A. I'm not so sure that that always works because I know my brother out in Blue Mounds and the valleys, he's still living in 4B, but some other areas, it's just interesting to see how this map has changed over time. So, the lower the number like 3B, the colder the temperatures that the plant can sustain and still come back. So if you see on a plant a tag that says zone 3, you know that it can survive up in some of those pink and purple areas in the state. The kind of medium blue color that's on the map, that's the 5A area. And some of the places near the lake, although they tend to be cooler, the lake moderates the winter temperature so they actually end up being a little bit warmer and so those are 5B. Now generally a tag is not going to tell you the difference between A and B. It's just going to give you the number. But if you live in a zone 4A or 4B and you buy a zone 5 plant, just keep in mind you're taking a little bit of a risk so put it in a protected area. We do not have any zone 6 in the state. So if you buy a plant that is zone 6, that's in terms of it's survivability are off. However, sometimes having said that plants don't always read the books or the labels, and so occasionally I've been able to get a zone 6 plant to survive for me at least until we have a zone 4 winter because, as you know, mother nature here in Wisconsin is not always very predictable, and so sometimes even though we're only supposed to in 5B go down to minus 20 to minus 15, sometimes we get a zone 4 winter where we go down to minus 25 to minus 20. And so that is part of the thing that goes into winter heartiness is how cold did it get? Then there's another thing. Did we get snow cover? If we got snow cover, then we're pretty much golden because the plant is only going to experience 32 degrees. If it's a perennial, it dies back to the ground. It's under the snow. But then we have some years where we're what we call snowless. Snowless in Madison. Snowless in Superior. Well, never snowless in Superior, but you get the idea that if we don't have snow cover like last year in November where we had an extremely cold snap after it had been fairly warm, we had a lot of damage not only to perennials but also to some of our trees and shrubs. And then there is the duration. If you just had a cold snap that lasted a day or two, it may not make any difference. If you have like the winter of 2013-- if you have cold that is very cold with drying winds that goes on and on and on and on, then you can have more damage and so plants may not survive that. When you have rain on top of snow for perennials, that is a really bad deal. A lot of the perennials, especially the ones that evolved in areas like prairies where they have good drainage in some of the drier prairies or if they're alpine plants that you have in your rock garden and you get rain on top of snow, you often will get ice pooling around the crowns of the plant as the rain kind of sifts through the snow and percolates through there and just gloms on to the crowns of the plant. If you have problems with ice pools forming in low areas of your yard, that's a place to really think about what kind of perennial you want to put there because there aren't a lot of perennials that enjoy that sort of thing. So you may want to do a little bit of landscaping to try and bring that grade up a bit. Finally, soil type is important as well. Plants may survive differently in sandy soils as opposed to clay soils. Heavy clay soils that retain a lot of moisture and we get the rain on top of snow is a really good recipe for perennial loss. And then fall conditions going into winter. Last year again, 2014, we had some issues where the weather was nice and warm and then it just dropped the bottom out, and then it got warm again. And so conditions like that where the plant doesn't get to gradually go into dormancy and prepare for dormancy can really cause some issues with some plants. The things that I noticed a lot of problems with this spring were some of the semi evergreen perennials. So coralbells, dianthus, hellebore, some of the other ones that were semi evergreen experienced a lot more dieback than usual over the winter. All right. So we start out with a good foundation for our newly purchased plant by planting it properly. And when you pull it out of the pot, if it is really pot bound or if you've got circling roots, it's a good idea to just gently break those roots up a little bit. I'm not advising wholesale mangling of the roots, but we call it tickling the roots. So gently kind of loosening them up a little bit. If they-- usually you're not going to find perennials being sold in peat pots, but if you do, then the peat pot should be removed. That's the same for annuals as well. So particularly at the bottom of the root mass, I generally will do most of my root tickling at the bottom, like quarter or third of the plant. And after you've planted and firmed the soil around it, I recommend putting some mulch on but no more than two to three inches at the most and don't bury the plant. You don't want the mulch right up against the plant if you can help it. Then there's proper watering. I'm a hand waterer. I really like to water things by hand because I can regulate the amount of water that the plant gets. And there are some perennials such as the astilbes that just love water, and need a lot of water to look good. And then there are other plants that will suffer if you give them too much water. So if you're just using a sprinkler, everybody gets the same amount. And that may be good for some and not so good for others. The other thing about sprinklers is that a lot of that water goes into the air and stays in the air and particularly if you've got a windy day or really hot day a lot of it's going to evaporate. If you've got mulch also and you're sprinkling, you may find that the water doesn't penetrate the mulch very well. Do an experiment the next time you use the sprinkler on a mulched area and check after about half an hour and see how far it has penetrated because it may not have penetrated as much as you thought. And if it doesn't get all the way through the mulch, the soil, well the plant isn't going to benefit from it a whole lot. New plants are going to need monitoring. They may need water a couple times a week or they may only need it once a week depending on the temperatures, the wind and what kind of soil you'd like and whether you're using mulch or not. So usually what I'll do with my hand watering is I take my water wand. I get it right down next to the base of the plant and I count one, two, three, four, five, six and then I'll move on to the next plant. One, two, three, five, six. And then I'll move back to the first plant again and give it another six count so that I'm sure that if we were on the slope, for example, that the water didn't just run off and that I get the soil fully wetted. Now, if you want to use drip irrigation, I say more power to you. That's great. And it works very well for some plants and not for others. So sedums, other succulents, cacti, none of those are going to be real happy with drip irrigation that's keeping the root system consistently moist, but a lot of our other common perennials and annuals will be very happy if you use a drip hose. Finally, there is a critter that is called a ross root feeder, and that is what is being used in the bottom picture, and what it is it's an attachment that goes on your hose. You can put fertilizer in there if you want to, but it has a metal stake on it, and at the end of the metal stake it is open so that the water goes through the stake and comes out the bottom. You have to be careful how you regulate the temperature because you don't want to just totally blast all the soil away from the roots, but I find that this is really helpful for me. My neighbor has this monster silver maple, and I have a hillside under the silver maple that is planted with hostas, and so it's hard for me to water that area because it's on a slope, and the water tends to run downhill. And if the mulch has dried out and have become hydrophobic, then again the water is just really hard to keep it where it needs to be so I use this ross root feeder to make sure I'm getting the water where it needs to go right to the root system. Silver maples, by the way, are just notorious for producing a take over the world massive root that is really hard for other plants to compete with so when you're planting perennials under silver maple, be very careful with your plant selection because there aren't a whole lot of plants that will do well there. Canada Ginger is one of the best for doing well in that area because it can handle some drought. Some of the hostas, the taller more vigorous ones, do okay. But it's really kind of hit or miss. I've been surprised at how many hostas are dwarfed just by the massive roots sucking up all the water. Okay, plant propagation. Once you have a plant that you like, you want to get more of it, right? And after awhile, most plants are going to need propagation in order to maintain their vigor. If you've ever had a perennial such as a Siberian iris that was growing in a beautiful, luxurious clump and then starts to thin out, die in the center, and you get this kind of donut thing going where you have just foliage and a ring on the outside, that's the plant saying it's time to propagate me. I need to be reinvigorated. Please help. So what you do at that point is you dig up the plant. You divide it into sections, and you replant it. That will stimulate it to produce more foliage and more roots. So plants do benefit from being propagated. Most plants that are perennials we propagate by division, and I'm just going to really quickly skip ahead to show you what that looks like where you separate out a crown where the plant is coming out of the soil and you kind of try and divide it into various clumps. So again, most of them are propagated by division. Some of them don't divide well. Dianthus is a good example of that. Dianthus will produce a tap root and then it has foliage that spreads out over the soil. So if you just stuck your shovel in, you might end up with a bunch of disembodied leaves that aren't really connected to anything. And then there are also some that have rhizomes, underground stems that will pop up and send more stems up that have the flowers and the leaves on them, so some that are really hard to divide that way are Russian sage, some of the salvias but not all of them. Oregano can be a little bit difficult too. Balloon flower is difficult because it has a tap root that's brittle and it sometimes breaks. Peonies which should only be dug in the fall and they have a really robust root system so you need to give them plenty of space when you're digging. And some of the coreopsis, one of the coreopsis I'm going to be showing you today also has that type of rhizome system that just makes propagation kind of a bear. Many plants can be divided at anytime during the season, but most recommendations are either for spring or fall and not during the heat of the summer. In general, you don't want to do dividing in late September or October because the plant doesn't have time to get established before the ground freezes and then it may not over winter for you. The exception for that is peonies. They just love being divided at that time of year, and it's the best time for their recovery and establishment. Once you've-- what I do sometimes for division is I will carve a chunk off the margin of a clump and just dig that up, but other times if I really want to do some major surgery, I'm going to dig up the whole clump and divide it on top of the soil and then replant back into the old hole as well as distribute the pieces around. So, make sure your shovel is sharp. You can buy a metal file at a local hardware store. Be sure to wear safety glasses when you're sharpening your shovel or you can use a butcher knife. That often works too for dividing the clumps up. And you can see the knife being used here. Okay. So, now we'll go into characteristics of sun perennials, and first of all, I need to define what is full sun. It's a really good question. What full sun is considered to consist of is six to eight hours or more of uninterrupted sun. Now, often though a west side or an east side of a building where you get either for west sun you get afternoon sun, but morning shade. East side of the building you tend to get morning sun and afternoon shade. Those are also considered full sun areas. What is not considered full sun is underneath a tree where you get dappled light or where you get more than four to six hours of shade. So, another thing to think of is that sun and heat are not necessarily the same thing, and that some plants that are adapted to full sun areas may still not like being planted on the south side of a white house where they get reflected heat and light off of that building or really dry, hot areas just because they like full sun. They may like full sun but moister soil than that. So, it's important to do your research, read the tag, talk to the person at the nursery before you put a plant in a stressful situation like that. Another thing is that if you plant things really close together, not only is that a good recipe for fungal diseases like powdery mildew, but also plants that don't have sufficient room to spread out, may get kind of tall and leggy and actually behave like they are planted in shade. Okay, so now we'll go through some of my favorite sun perennials. This is one that is, as you can tell, an ornamental onion. The flower head is certainly a lot bigger than chives. But it does kind of resemble chives on steroids. The leaves are flat. They're about quarter to half an inch wide. And this plant does like sun, but it will take partial shade. It is a zone 4 plant so for those of you way up in the northern part of the state, this may not be a good option, but at least 2/3 of the state should be able to grow this plant. One thing I really like about it is that the leaves look perky all season long. They don't start to look tired. They don't get preyed upon by pests or diseases, and not even rabbits and deer will eat it. So if you've got problems with rabbits and deer, this is one that you may want to look into. They're not fond of these. So this one blooms in mid July, and usually the flowers last about three weeks. Well, you can leave the seed heads on if you desire. You can also take them off. The nice thing is that unlike a lot of ornamental onions, this one, the flowers are sterile so you're not going to get tons of it all over your yard like you would with some of the other ornamental onion species. This one is a bell flower or campanula. A lot of bell flowers come in two different kinds of growth habits. There's the tall ones, and then there's the short spready ones. And this one is kind of intermediate between the two. I guess I'd classify it as a taller one because it's upright. A lot of the bell flowers do hang down like bells. That's how they got their name, but some of them have upright flowers as well where you can look into the flower. This one we have at the Dane County teaching garden, and it was in bloom-- full bloom for the last couple of weeks. It's starting to go out of its full bloom. But this one will rebloom particularly if you keep it dead headed all the way through the season. It provides a lot of color, and those flowers are just knock your socks off dark purple. They really make a nice show in the landscape. It is also one that benefits from frequent divisions so every couple of years dividing it. I have certainly filled in a lot of places in my yard by dividing this one. And it does form a clump that will slowly spread so it's pretty easy to divide as well. This is one of our native wild flowers, Rose Turtlehead. It also comes in white. If you're hiking out in the Arboretum or another place where you have a mesic prairie or wet prairie, you may see this plant growing out there. And this one blooms later in the season. I really like that because at the end of the season we have so many flowers that look like asters because they're in the aster family. So this is one that doesn't. It's named Turtlehead because I guess if you really squint and maybe after a few beers it's supposed to look-- the flower like a turtle head, turtle's head pink or white heads. But anyway, you get the idea. It's a really nice native plant. The leaves look nice all season long, and it does take some shade and better yet, it will grow near black walnuts. There are not a whole lot of plants that get along with black walnuts because the walnuts have allelopathic tendency where they produce a chemical called juglone that is exuded in the roots and into the soil, and it inhibits the growth of other plants. So, while it's a great competitive advantage for the black walnut, it's not so great for a lot of other plants. This one being this rose turtle head being a wet prairie plant where it grows in the wild, it's not real tolerant of drought so you don't want to put it any place where it is going to be in really hot dry soil. Another great thing about it is that bees and butterflies like it a lot. The flowers are about an inch long and they form a short head that's about four inches long at the top of each stem. Really nice shiny leaves. This is a really nice plant. It does, though, I should say form colonies over time so-- and it's not very easy to divide so when you try and keep it inbounds you probably won't be able to keep much of those ones that you took out going, but it spreads very slowly so it's not a megalomaniac bent on taking over the world. This is one of the coreopsis that I mentioned that is hard to divide. It's root structure is that it forms a lot of these kind of curved rhizomes under the ground that then come up and form the stems of the plant, and it is hard to get enough roots together in a clump that you can keep it going. It does tend to form larger clumps as well, but it is also not real fast growing. This one is hearty to zone 3, so even those of you up in the top of the state can definitely grow this plant. This has one of the longest blooming periods of any of our perennials. So it blooms June through September down here in the southern part of the state. And if you dead head it-- in other words, you cut off all the dead flowers just about an inch off the-- kind of give it a hair cut across the top of the clump, it will rebloom for you a number of times during the season. Now, it is no one that tolerates wet soil very well. That's a really good way to get some root rot going so don't put it in a low spot where you tend to get ice forming over the winter. It is a fairly decent cut flower. I wouldn't say that it lasts a week, but it probably lasts three days or so, four days, maybe in a vase. Occasionally at the end of the season, you might see some mildew on the leaves, but in general it is a pretty disease free plant as long as it gets good sun and good air circulation. This is a really nice little plant for rock garden areas. We did have some dieback on some of the dianthus last year because again, they are those semi evergreens and we had that really cold snap at the end of November before we had any snow. But in general, this plant lasts a good five, seven years or so. And the definition of a perennial is technically a plant that survives three to five years. Some of our perennials will last 10, 12 years. Others are more short lived. So this is more a little bit on the short-lived side. A lot of the plants that are perennials that are short-lived tend to be ones that live three or four years and then they seed and then they die. Foxglove would be an example or Corydalis. So, this one is again one of those that has a tap root and then it spreads out over the soil. It has absolutely gorgeous kind of blue-green leaves that really look very powdery. So it's attractive even when it isn't in bloom. That's an example of one that has colorful foliage. It also is a rebloomer so if you cut back the flower heads after they've died, it will often rebloom sporadically for you. These flowers are very fragrant but being a very short plant, you kind of have to stand on your head to smell it. So I like to use it in areas that are going upstairs for example so that your nose ends up closer to it or at the top of rock walls or in a rock garden setting. There has been a huge expansion of breeding with cone flowers. Back in the early 2000's, it started with Jim Ault from the Chicago Botanic Garden, and he bred one of the first orange cone flowers, cone flower with orange petals. And it has kind of snowballed since then. So we now have double cone flowers that the typical cone in the middle has got petals as well as the regular ray flower petals that you see at the bottom of the flower. It almost looks like a shuttlecock from a badminton game. And there are a number of cone flowers that are doubles like this. This one, Hot Papaya, I really like because it is a long bloomer. It holds its color really well. It forms a nice solid clump and it does occasionally get some Japanese beetle problems, but other then that, it really is a really good performer and it's fragrant. A lot of the cone flowers are not fragrant so this one is really nice, and that it is. This one is from Dutch breeder, Arie Blom. So whenever I hear that he's gotten another selection out, I always try it because his plants tend to be really good. If you're looking for a ground cover that isn't too thick, Geranium Rozanne is a good choice. This one is also a good replacement for an older geranium called Johnson's Blue. Now as much as I might like that name, having the last name Johnson, I've got to say that that plant tends to-- the clump tends to fall apart after it blooms. It splits in the middle, and the flowers lay down in the ground. So even though it's got a nice blue color to it, it isn't what I would call a great garden plant. This one, however, is short enough and sturdy enough that it really doesn't have any issues with falling over. The flowers are also larger, and they really do that-- blue color is pretty representative of what they look like. Really nice plant and also the leaves have a little bit of subtle variegation on it that adds some more interest. Now the one problem with it is that it is vigorous, and it does take up some real estate. So figure it's going to spread about three feet when you put it in. It also has a really long bloom period, which is nice, June through October, and it was even chosen by the Perennial Plant Society as the 2008 perennial plant of the year. If you're really in to perennials, you might want to check out the Perennial Plant Society. You can go to their website if you just do an internet search on Perennial Plant Society. They have conferences that move all over the country. They also have publications and so that yearly conference I got to go one year, and it was in Chicago then. And they have breeders that talk about perennials. They have vendors that are showing new perennials that aren't on the market yet. So you can salivate over them for several years until they're available I guess. And there are people that have done trials with different perennials like trying several different varieties of salvias at university settings and you get to find out what the research is and it's just-- if you're a perennial geek like me, it's a lot of fun. I could do a whole presentation on ornamental grasses, but I just kept myself to three. So just to give you a kind of a little taste of what ornamental grasses are about is I'll give you these few characteristics. Most of them need full sun, at least six hours a day. Otherwise, they become thin. They flop. They just don't perform very well. Most of them are prairie plants or European plants in origin and they're either from meadow or prairie situations. Some of them are spreaders, and most of those we don't want to grow in our small gardens. So for example, Big Blue Stem which is a beautiful prairie grass forms a sod just like your Kentucky Bluegrass. So it's not going to stay in one place. It's going to do what it does. So, that one may not be good for a smaller garden. On the other hand, if you have large areas to cover, by all means go for big blue stem. Little Blue Stem tends to grow more in clumps so that one is a good one for some gardens. So most of these that I'm going to be referring to here are the clumper varieties so they're not going to spread all over the place. Most of them should be either cut down in early spring so if you like the look of the seed heads over the winter and some of them have great seed heads over the winter, others will shatter and look awful and so you kind of need to look into that. You can leave them up over winter and do your maintenance work cutting them down in spring, but you need to do it in spring before they start blooming. I regret to say that out here in the teaching garden there's a couple clumps that I missed, and they haven't been cut back yet and now they're growing and it's going to be a maintenance nightmare to pull out all the dead stems. It tends to make a big mess, and it can inhibit the plants from filling in as well as they should. So either cut them down in the spring or in the fall. Just make sure that you do it. Most of them can be divided either in the spring or in the early summer or early fall. But they're really not very fussy. But you want to make sure that you're doing it at a time of year when you give them enough time to get established before winter and at a time when it's not too hot and dry out so that they have trouble getting re-established. So this one you have probably seen out in front of every gas station, McDonald's or other insert name of mall. It is unfortunately somewhat overused, but it is a beautiful plant. So I have it here in the presentation. This is Karl Foerster Feather Reed Grass. There is a feather reed grass that I actually like better that the grass blades are variegated. It's called Eldorado, and with that one the seed heads look more like a bottle brush. This one has almost wheat-like looking flowers. It's a great one for a vertical accent because it's very upright and even rain doesn't tend to make it flop like some of the taller ones. The taller ones you have to stake. None of the ones I'm going to recommend are ones you should have to stake. So I don't have to like to waste my time with staking grasses. This is a European species. The other Calamagrostis that I mentioned is also a European species. So, a real nice reliable perennial plant. If you're looking for some blue color in your yard as well as an upright kind of accent, this is a nice smaller size plant. In my yard, it only gets about 18 inches, both in height and spread, and I've had it for four or five years and divided it a couple of times. It is a very spiky grass. Really nice reliable one here in southern Wisconsin. I particularly like the variety called sapphire, and that's the one you're going to find most often in the marketplace. This one is a lot better than the blue fescues. The blue fescues although they even are a bluer color tend to not survive very well in clay soil. So about half of the plant dies out usually in the middle and then you have a ring around the edge, and you wish the whole thing would have died out, but they just don't survive very long. If you have sandier soil, fescues can be a really good option. The one thing about blue oat grass is that you need to put it some place where it doesn't get really wet over winter because it's not very tolerant of that. This one is a cultivar of our native switch grass, and the switch grasses all are in the genus Panicum. There are some that are quite tall like Dallas Blue and there are some like this one which is called Shenandoah that is about three to four feet tall. I really like this one in the perennial garden because of its size but also because of the color. The leaves actually start out kind of a blue to purple color, and then over the season about the time you get to July you start to see really scarlet red and kind of burgundy colored stripes on the foliage and it gradually turns all red. The seed heads which you can't see very well in this picture are very delicate looking. They're like large bottle brushes or large scrub brushes, and when you see that kind of seed head that's really indicative of the Panicum genus. And switch grass you may have heard of in another context are native switch grass and again this is just a cultivar or a cultivated variety of our native switch grass. The native one is used as a bioenergy source so you may have heard about switch grass being used in that context. What would a perennial talk be without daylilies? Daylilies are one of the backbones of the perennial garden. They grow in a nice clump. They bloom pretty much in the middle of the season, although some bloom earlier, some bloom later. Most of them down here in the Madison area full bloom is going to be around the second or third week of July. However, you can grow them all the way up into zone 3 so as long as you have enough sun for them, they should perform well. Now, there has been a lot of breeding done with daylilies too. There are something like 30,000 cultivars of daylilies so if you pick up a plant catalog from a daylily company and you look at another daylily company's catalog, there is often very little overlap. They have done breeding for I zones, so if you look at the one in the upper left corner, that one has a very prominent I zone. It also has a very kind of lacy or pie crusting around the edges of the-- or the margins of the flower. They've been breeding for that as well. They've also been breeding for nectar lines. If you go down looking at the pink one at the bottom, you can see that there are some very distinct pronounced lines. Those actually in nature are used to help guide the bee into the center of the flower, and if you were to look at this from a bee's eye, it does form kind of a road map and other plants like pansies also have those lines. They've done breeding work also to make double flowers such as the one in the upper or middle right. And so you can get tall daylilies that are over three feet tall. You can get miniature daylilies that are only a foot tall. And some of them are rebloomers. I like to try and get those, although some of them rebloom so late in the season that it doesn't make any difference to those of us in here in Wisconsin. Might to those in Illinois or Iowa or a little farther south of us. Some of them are fragrant and about there only two problems, the first one is earwigs, and earwigs can chew on the sides of the leaves. Usually they don't effect the flowers too much, but if you see chewing along the sides of the leaves that's often earwigs doing that kind of damage, and then there are a couple of folier diseases. One is called leaf streak, and the good thing about leaf streak is that it's not lethal. It may make your plant look pretty rough, but with leaf streak, it usually goes up the middle of the leaf and if you pull the leaf out, that will help control it. The only problem is if all the leaves are effected obviously you can't pull them all out. So that can be an issue with some cultivars more sensitive than others. Another one that is more serious is called daylily rust. And daylily rust we think does not over winter in Wisconsin hopefully. It is more common down South, and that actually will kill the daylily. And it looks similar to leaf streak, but if you were to rub your finger on the bottom side of the leaf, then it comes away orange, then you know you've got a rust fungus instead of leaf streak. Leaf streak you can run your fingers up the leaf all day, and you're not going to get anything coming off on your fingers. So daylilies are often used on commercial properties because of how reliably they bloom and that they bloom usually for about a month, which is a really nice thing. So there are a lot of companies that produce daylilies. I would be a little cautious about ordering daylilies from too far South, again because of that daylily rust issue. Back when I was a kid, Shasta Daisies were kind of thought of as weedy perennials, and there are certainly some weedy perennial shastas that are out there, but they've done a lot of breeding with the shasta daisies so that they don't spread all over the place and seed all over the place like they used to. They bred them for stronger stems so that they stand up instead of flopping, and I think this is one of the best new cultivars. There's one that looks very similar that's called Goldfinch that's even shorter, but this one forms a nice-- in my yard, it's 18 inches. Here in the teaching garden, it also gets to be about that size. And it is a wider plant too. Now, it generally has a huge bloom that comes out in June, and it blooms for about a month. And then if you cut it back, it will bloom sporadically often into September, less commonly into October, but you can get flowers in October as well. It does benefit from division on a fairly regular basis. The only kind of diva aspect to this plant is that sometimes the hot sun in the afternoon will cause it to wilt a little bit. Doesn't mean that it's dying or anything like that, but if you can put it where it gets a little bit of afternoon shade, it will certainly reward you for that. It is also a semi evergreen plant. I still cut it down in fall, and it is all the-- I should say also somewhat disease resistant. Some of the shasta daisies get folier diseases, but this one not so much. And those flowers are really there about four inches across. They are just magnificent. Asiatic lilies are a favorite in the garden, unfortunately also a favorite of rabbits, particularly early in the season. This year has been an excellent rabbit year unfortunately, and I have a number of lilies that have a denuded stem that has no leaves and buds at the top. So they really like those leaves. Something like Liquid Fence is a good rabbit repellant. You can use things like bone meal sprinkled around the plant but realize that with both of those products you need to reapply after every rain event. Also if you water and get the leaves wet. There are some other products out there. Ropel is one, and there are a number of different varieties. So, many different things can work as rabbit repellants. You might also-- I hope you don't have to fence but sometimes fencing is an option as well. The lilies, and these are true lilies as opposed to daylilies whch are not technically a lily at all. These asiatic lilies are hearty to zone 4, so most of the state. You can either buy them in the fall as bulbs and plant them that way, or you can buy them already sprouted as plants. If you buy them as plants, make sure you plant them at the same depth as they were in the nursery like a regular perennial, but if you buy a bulb, they need to be planted about six inches deep. Four to five-- if you've got heavy clay soil, four to five. If you've got less heavy soil, then they can be planted deeper in less heavy soil. So again, rabbits are a problem with this plant, particularly in the spring, but it is a great cut flower. One issue with them and also with the Stargazer or Oriental lilies is that the stamens which are the male part of the plant that carry the pollen are-- the pollen stains your clothes, and I have a number of T-shirts to prove it right about this level where I brushed by the plant. So if you're going to be walking around in your garden or you're having people over, you may want to pick those stamens off. So those are the brown things that are protruding at the top of the stamen in the middle of the plant. Catmint, it's different from catnip. It's the same genus. Catnip is Nepeta Vulgaris, but Nepeta Faaseni is a catmint. Cats still like it. They don't like it quite as well as catnip, but if you have roaming neighborhood cats, you may find this flattened as they've rolled around in it. So, the good thing is that rabbits and deer don't like it. So if you have rabbits and deer, they may not munch on this. It is an early season bloomer, but it blooms for a really long time. It started here in May and it is almost July now, and it is still blooming. So that's pretty incredible. After it does bloom, I usually cut it back by about half. It will often produce a lighter rebloom, but it will fill in the clump again and look nice for you the rest of the season. This is also one that had some of that texture quality that I was talking about earlier. It looks kind of fuzzy and so it's a nice contrast in the garden. Makes a really nice dense clump. So even when it's not blooming, there is some interest for it. Tons of different garden phlox available. One of the bset known is one called David that was perennial plant of the year back in 2001 or 2 or 3, can't quite remember. But one of those early 2000's. David is a very fragrant, extremely disease resistant white phlox, and again phlox are a species that I only buy the ones that are mildew resistant because I don't like the look of the non-mildew resistant ones. You do want to make sure when you plant them that you put them some place with good air circulation, and you don't crowd them too much because good air circulation will increase their resistance to powdery mildew because it decreases the humidity. If you don't have good air circulation, you have more humidity. You have more powdery mildew. This plant is best in full sun. Again partly because of the powdery mildew, partly because it blooms better in full sun or at least western exposure is best for it. It is a shorter species of garden phlox, and I really like it. It's kind of a fun, kind of a carnival look to it. Kind of pinwheel look. Most of the garden phlox should be divided about every three years to maintain their vigor. There are also some really disease resistant ones I'd like to recommend. One of them is called Laura. It's purple, and another one is called Katherine and that one is also purple. So, great cut flowers. They're good for attracting butterflies. They're very fragrant. These are a very common old fashioned flower for the taller perennial border. Going from tall to short, this is a species of-- or a cultivar I should say, of Platycodon or Balloon flower. And there are certainly some taller cultivars of balloon flower. The only problem is you usually need to stake them and since staking is not my main goal in life, I like the shorter one because you don't have to stake it. Also because it just blooms its little socks off. It is an amazing bloomer. Now, the flip side of that is once the flowers are dead, it unfortunately maintains all those dead heads that look like little brown paper bags hanging on the plant, so you do have to do some maintenance after it's bloomed to go through and remove all those. And one problem that some people have is the milky sap that is contained in the stems and leaves gives some people dermatitis. So if you are susceptible to that kind of thing wear gloves when you do cut it back. Keeping it dead-headed will keep it blooming as well as prevent the dead paper bag look that is not quite so nice to look at. It does have a nice long blooming period of a good month, and even when it's not blooming the leaves are a nice dark green, and it grows in a thick clump. This is one of the slower to emerge perennials so I always tell people with Balloon flowers don't panic if it's the end of May and you still haven't seen it yet. It's just kind of slow to get out of bed in the Spring. So, also don't start digging in that area. What I usually recommend for Balloon flower and other plants that are slow to emerge or that emerge with purple stems that kind of blend into the soil such as Japanese Painted Fern is that you put a label in there so you can find the darn thing in the spring so you don't step on it like I did once. Another common garden plant is the Ornamental Sedum. Autumn Joy is probably one that everybody has heard of and grown. This is a variegated version of Autumn Joy that's called Autumn Charm. The cultivar name is Lajos and so you may see it under either name. It's a little bit shorter than Autumn Joy, but a really nice perky looking plant even when it isn't in bloom. We've go a whole border of it that just looks really nice and well maintained, dense during the growing season out here at the teaching garden. Keep in mind that sedums do best in dry soil or at least average soil, but not wet soil. And many of them will actually take light shade, although they tend to not bloom quite as well in light shade. The nice thing is that they're heat and drought tolerant. I got a lot of calls about sedum during the drought year of 2012 when people were saying my insert name of plant died out because of the drought. What should I plant? And I would ask, well what is your conditions like? And if they said hot, dry, full sun, I'd say put a sedum in there. Now, you may wonder why this aster is at the end of the presentation of the sun plants instead of at the beginning is that the taxonomists got hold of the genus Aster and they changed all of our native asters to the name Symphyotrichum, which as a horticulturist, I'm like really? You really had to take a perfectly serviceable two syllable name and change it into something that is multiple syllables and harder to spell? But so you now have the New York and I'm trying to remember what the other species of Aster is. A lot of our native asters here in the U.S. that have now been changed over to Symphyotrichum. You probably won't find them labeled as such in the nursery. You will probably still see them as aster, but just to let you know, that name is out there. So this one, Purple Dome, is a great aster. We have many asters that are seedy, that flop over, that the centers fall open, etc., etc. But this one is a really nice sturdy character, and it is a bit shorter. It generally tends to be somewhat less disease prone than our other asters. It is not a seeder. So it is not going to appear in multiple places in your garden. It does form a nice thick clump that will spread slowly. And-- but like any other aster, because of the folier diseases they typically get, I do like to cut them down in the fall so that I take any inoculum from disease material away so that it is not there to bother me again in the spring. One other problem with asters is that they are also rabbit food, and I have all of my asters this year. I do not think are going to bloom because I have some baby bunnies in my backyard. I will not tell you what I call the baby bunnies, but it is not anything nice, and they have eaten all of my asters down to the nubbies. And so I'm quite disgusted about that. But it is very common unfortunately with asters. I should have gotten in there earlier with the liquid fence or other repellant product. Sunny Border Blue fortunately is not favored by rabbits, and it is a wonderful long season bloomer. Also very, very cold hearty. This is one of the most disease resistant Speedwells or Veronicas that is out there on the market, and it will form a really nice clump. Again, it works very well as a cut flower. Nice foil for some things that are yellow or gold blooming such as Gaillardia or Blanket Flower or Black-eyed Susans and a number of the things like cone flowers that bloom at the same time. It does get some disease on the lower leaves so do be sure when you're doing your perennial clean up in the fall to cut it back. But it will take full sun or part shade works well either in morning sun in east side of your house or the west side of your house or the south side. Okay, now we're going to talk about shade perennials. So I call this the 50 shades of shade because there are always multiple degrees of shade and people say, "Well what is full shade versus part shade?" Well, it's really hard to define. But in general, when I'm talking about shade, I'm looking at shade that is cast by buildings or under trees. So even though west or east exposures as long as you have six hours of sun are considered full sun, you still end up with another few hours of shade. So a lot of the partial shade plants do well on an east or west side of your house. Then, there is light under tall canopy like under an oak. Often plants that are listed as growing under light shade will grow really well in that kind of area. Under a birch that has very spread out branches and small leaves. Honey Locust also has very small leaves. So that works really well for plants that do well in light shade. Dappled sunlight would be like under a sugar maple where you have peaks of sunlight that are coming in all day, but not necessarily a lot of full sun. And then there's dense canopy like under a Norway Maple, which has really wide leaves and you can't even grow grass under a Norway Maple. So if turf doesn't grow there, then you've got a pretty good clue that you've got full shade. Also areas where you get no direct sunlight at all, and it's in shade all day, that's considered full shade. But even in full shade, if you have a light colored house, you still get some reflected light even on those north sides that don't get any direct sunlight as opposed to a dark or brick colored house where you don't get any reflected light. So plants that will take full shade are unfortunately few and far between, but we do have some of them here in this presentation. This is one of them. This is European Wild Ginger. We also have our Native Wild Ginger. Our native is not semi evergreen. It's not shiny. The leaves are fuzzy, and lighter colored green. It is more of a spreader than the European Wild Ginger. I like the more refined nature of European Wild Ginger, but I use the Canada Wild Ginger under my neighbor's silver maple because I know it's going to survive there, and it's going to look good. This one probably would not do quite as well. It prefers rich moist soil, but it still will survive under sugar maples although not probably silver maples. Glossy semi evergreen leaves, it tends to be a slow grower, but once it is happy, it will start not invasively so, but you will find clumps of it coming up in different areas of your yard. You may be wondering where the flowers are. Well, the flowers in both of these species, native and European, are under the leaves. So you really have to stand on your head and dig around under the leaves to see the flowers, and then when you see them, you probably won't be that excited because they're just-- they're not pollenated by bees, so they don't need to look flashy. They don't need to be fragrant. They don't need to have nectar lines. So they're pollenated by beetles, and the native one has a red kind of triangular flower that is the color of carrion, and it attracts a particular type of beetle. These have a little green tube of a flower that is-- nobody's going to write home about. But the foliage is kind of nice, and it's a nice foil with ferns in particular. Speaking of ferns, this is the Japanese Painted Fern. There are many cultivars out there now, and they all differ in very subtle ways from each other. There's Ursula's Red, which has more of a red color to the foliage. In the center of each frond, there is also Burgundy Lace which has the same kind of thing. There's one that's called Ghost that is kind of a light mint green color instead of silver. But the thing that I really like about the Japanese Painted Fern is that silver color because if you have full shade, it's dark. And this is one way to brighten up a dark area is with that silver color foliage. It does maintain that foliage very well in deep shade. Now this is one that comes up very late in the season, and when it comes up, the fronds are very delicate, and they're purple color. So it is very easy to step on them like I did when I was stomping around wondering where the heck my fern was in the early spring. So this is another one that you should put a label in or a rock or something so that you can find the darn thing. Also like most ferns, it is not tolerant of dry shade so make sure that it has sufficient water. Another silver foliage plant. This is Jack Frost Siberian Forget-Me Not or Brunnera. The wild version of Brunnera just has a kind of unremarkable looking heart shape dark green leaf, but since they've been fussing with the genetics and the breeding, we have several that have this fantastic silver coloring on them. There's a new one called King's Ransom that has silver and a little bit of gold outline on the leaves. There's one that was bred here in the Madison area that was introduced by Steve Lesch, but the homeowner, Diane, who lives in Madison found a spontaneous mutation of this plant in her garden where it had gold colored leaves. So it's called Diane's Gold, and you may be able to find that in some of the nurseries around here. They all have the same blue flowers except that there are some that have white, but those are the only two colors the flowers come in. It's not really grown for the flowers, although there are nice benefit. They're quite small. They're that blue color that you get the common name Forget-Me Not from, but it's really not a Forget-Me Not. It does bloom also very early in the season, and it is another moisture lover. It will take light to medium shade. If it's in deep shade,it won't bloom very well, and it tends to get kind of thin. When you first plant it, make sure that you mulch it well that first winter so that it gets through the winter okay. Another blue flowered plant that is absolutely fantastic is a hybrid Gentian called True Blue. Now, we do have native gentians here in Wisconsin. The bottled gentian is a beautiful dark blue color. It never opens up. This one does open up. It's also quite a bit shorter than our native. Works well in part shade situations. Unfortunately, those of you up north are not going to be able to grow this because it is zone 5 plant, but it is so gorgeous, I had to put it in. I love to put it along with some annual pink impatiens or yellow colored hostas because the colors just really pop. This one's not so exciting looking when it isn't in bloom, but it does have a long bloom period, and when it is in flower, it's just-- that true blue color is so hard to find in nature so it's really nice to have that plant available. There are grasses that do grow in shade. There are also sedges that grow in shade. This is one of my favorites. It's Japanese species, Japanese forest grass that's called Hakone Grass. So the Latin reflects that, Hakonechloa. And this variety has a dark green stripe down the center of a gold leaf. The wild species, of course, is all green, but you will find a couple of different varieties that are available in the nurseries. There's white variety that has a red to dark green stripe in the middle. There's an all gold one called All Gold that as you might guess is all gold. It is unfortunately again a zone 5 plant so people up North may not be able to benefit from it, but really contrast very nicely, texturely with hostas and other things like the ginger that we talked about earlier because of the textural contrast, but also the arching habit. This is one that when the wind blows even a little bit, the whole clump just kind of sways, and it really adds a lot of movement to the garden, and people are just drawn to it. Unfortunately, it's a fairly slow grower. It takes a long time to get a decent size clump. So, it takes a bit of babying, but definitely worth the effort. This is another plant that genetic mutations and breeding efforts have done a lot with. The Coralbells. We have a native coralbell here in Wisconsin, and it forms one of the breeding partners. There are also other western species that are involved in a lot of these hybrids. So about, oh gosh, 15 years ago now, yeah, 15 or maybe 20, 25 years by now, a guy named Dan Heims at Terra Nova Nurseries started messing around with creating purple foliage, Heuchera or Coralbells, and these Heucheras have now proliferated marvelously, and we have pinks and oranges and purples and the regular green. Most of them have some kind of silver marbeling on them. There are some that do better than others here in the heavy clay area of the state, and being that they're bred out on the West Coast and not all of the breeding is out there, but a lot of it is. Some of them are not well adapted for heavy clay soils, and you'll be able to tell those because they start out a nice size and then they just gradually get smaller and smaller and smaller. And eventually you give up and take them out. But this is one of the ones that I have found survives a long time. Another one is Dolce Blackcurrant, and that one has dark purple leaves with silvery filigrees on them. So that one's another nice one. These are grown mostly for their foliage, but they are doing more breeding now for these newer ones to have more colorful flowers, bigger flowers. The flowers are always on-- they're spike on a stem, and they look like little tiny bells, hence the name coralbells. Some of them are white. Some of them are pink. Some of them are red, but again most of these newer varieties are grown mostly for foliage. Then the hostas. Again, we can do a whole week's worth of hostas because there's something like 9,000 hosta varieties that are out there, and people like me who are hostafiles, love them all. And it was very hard for me to wittle this down to a couple, but I have an example of one of the small ones and one of the larger ones. So, Blue Mouse Ears came out in I think 2006 or so, and quickly was nominated as hosta of the year. That is because it is a vigorous little guy, and it forms a nice clump rather quickly. It holds its blue color very well. And it has spawned a number of different cultivars. There is now Green Mouse Ears, Frosted Mouse Ears, Holy Mouse Ears, Cat and Mouse, Confused Mouse, Dancing Mouse, etc., etc. And they're all really cool small little plants, and they just look cuter than a mouse's ear in the garden. And one thing I really like is that on some of them such as the original blue mouse ears, the flowers actually look attractive. In many cases, hosta flowers are not always very exciting. Sometimes there's a short clump with like a three foot stalk that looks totally mismatched with the plant so I often cut flowers off, but this one, the flowers actually add to the look of the plant. So this is a very nice little plant. Does very well in our gardens. Great Expectations is one that always garners some attention because of it's splendid coloring. Usually it will start out with three colors, and it'll end up with three colors, but not the same colors. When it comes out in the spring, it has more of a golden center, and some blue and green streaking. As the season goes on, the gold turns to kind of a cream color. The blue turns to kind of a light green, and the dark green stays dark green. It does-- the flowers are, I would say not spectacular, and they're always produced very close to the top of the foliage so I usually take them off because sometimes they're hidden in the foliage and then they really look stupid. So I usually take those off. This is a plant that is a slow grower, takes at least three years to get established. You don't get great big leaves until probably it's fifth year, and that's just the nature of the beast. Some of these take a longer time to establish than others. But great expectations is a really nice plant. It has good substance. We always talk about slugs when we talk about hostas because slugs are the hostas worst enemy. This one, the foliage, although it will still get some holes in it, doesn't get eaten like some of the other ones because it has that nice thick substance on it. This is another one of our native wild flowers, Mertensia or Virginia Bluebells. And this plant is native all the way up and down the state. You can see it blooming in various forested areas in the Spring. It looks really nice with our native trillium. The one problem with this as a garden plant is that it is not one that stays all season. It's somewhat a ephemeral, so it comes up. It produces these beautiful sky blue flowers and then usually around the beginning of June, it starts to go dormant for the season. That's not a problem if you're ready for it. One thing that you can do is either plant things nearby like hostas that come up a little bit later and are going to spread to hide that foliage or like I do, I put pots of plants or garden art in those holes that have opened up in my garden or you can put annuals for shade in those kinds of areas. So this one depending on its vigor and how much moisture it gets, it can get 12 to 24 inches tall, but a really beautiful sight in the early spring. We do have a native Solomon Seal which is quite large and it definitely makes a statement in the perennial garden. You'll see these spikes that have opposite leaves just like this one. This is a Japanese variety as you might guess from the name. I particularly like this one, though, because it's variegated, and I also like the size of it. It blends in very well with other plants in the garden. Now, the flowers on Solomon's Seals in general are not too exciting looking. There are these kind of limp hanging little tubes and our native one looks very similar, little white tubes. The native one also gets berries as does this one, although this one tends to-- the berries aren't quite as visible, but they both bloom about the same time. This one is much easier to manage, though, in the garden. Our native has a root that just won't quit. It's big. It's tuberous. It is spreading all over the place underground so it'll form a clump, but it also will explore other areas. This one stays as a nice manageable clump, and it's easy to divide when you want more of it. I also like it's kind of arching habit. Just kind of adds another little textural element to this, those arching stems. This is a good one if you have dry shade. Now, I'm not sure-- because I haven't tried it under a Silver Maple, but we do have one near our front door where it never gets any rain because it's under an overhang, and it has done very well there. So it spreads very slowly into a clump. It can form colonies over time, but it's very easy to keep up with unlike our native one. Another silver foliage plant for deep shade that will survive in many areas around the state is Pulmonaria. One of my favorites that I don't have in this presentation is called Dark Vader, just because I love the name. Unfortunately, the leaf isn't-- doesn't look quite like this. It's got the usual spots on it. Most pulmonarias have spotted leaves, but some of them are completely silver such as Excalibur, which is named for that silvery kind of sword shaped leaf. Pulmonarias are among the first perennials that bloom in Spring, and usually they either have pink flowers that turn blue or blue flowers that turn pink or they may have white flowers, but that's the color pallet. That's all you've got. When they bloom and the leaves will come up afterwards. After the blooms are done, it's a good idea to cut off the flower stems. Usually what'll happen is the flower stems will kind of flop towards the outside of the plant, and you can hold up the foliage in the center and then just cut around the base and get rid of those old stems. That will stimulate more leaf production. It'll look nice and dense and full for the rest of the season. These do tolerate dry soil. So it can-- I wouldn't put it under Silver Maple, but it can go in some of those drier areas. It does form a clump, but it is not a real fast spreading clump. You may occasionally find little seedlings coming up, but not a lot of them. And one of the plants that I always like to publicize as much as possible are Tiarellas or Foam Flowers. We do have some Tiarella species growing native here in the state, but they're endangered so we don't have a lot of them that are out there, but as far as breeding goes, there are two main types. One that is the cordifolias that grow in a clump. The other is the Wherryi, Tiarella Wherryi that grows as a spreader. So depending on the variety that you get, you may get a ground cover or you may not. So it's a good idea to look at the label and see whether it grows in a clump or not. Sometimes you can tell from the name. Jeepers Creepers, that's another Dan Heims cultivar. Dan always comes up with interesting names. He's got one plant that's named Black Negligee that has purple lacy leaves. So you kind of get an idea. He's a real character. You should check out his website at Terra Nova Nursery. But anyway, he does a lot of breeding with Tiarellas and with the Heucheras or Coralbells. So, this-- the Coralbells as a native plant, they don't have any of the fancy dissecting on the leaves, any of those lobes. They don't-- well they do have some lobes, but not like this. They don't have the ink blot splotch on the leaves so that's all been accomplished through bleeding, but boy, they've come up with some really nice ones. And as I was saying, you might end up with a spreader or not. So Jeepers Creepers-- let's see, Pacific Crest. There's a whole new series of national park ones. So there are some that are in that category. Running Tapestry, that might give you an idea that it's a spreader, so it is. But this one, Sugar and Spice, is my current favorite. It's got a shiny leaf which none of the other cultivars seem to have, and it still has those wonderful snowflake-like bottle brush foamy kind of flowers. Most of the Tiarellas have either pure white or white that changes to pink, very light pink. It's a very subtle difference. There's one called Pink Skyrocket that is a very pale pink but pretty. And a number of these also the leaves will change color a bit in the Fall. This one, the leaves get a bit reddish in the Fall. Others get kind of coral colored. Some of them don't change color. All the Tiarellas will grow under black walnut, which is yay, a good thing. And this particular one forms a nice clump. Unfortunately, I've discovered this year that rabbits also find this attractive. So I'm currently trying to protect my Tiarella from rabbits. I wanted to just leave you with some recommended resources. My very favorite perennial book is written by the sort of acknowledged perennial queen, Tracy DiSabato-Aust, and she's from Ohio. So, she's a Midwesterner. And she has a perennial maintenance garden installation business. And she can tell you in that book all about many different varieties of perennial plants, how to take care of them, what type of soil, what type of light, when to dead head them, how to divide them. It's just a fantastic book. I also recommend Growing Perennials in Cold Climates. Mike Heger is located in Minnesota, so that's a really good book for our area. One of the older tomes but still a goody, and it is a tome. It's about two or three inches thick is Herbaceous Perennial Plants by Allan Armitage. Perennials for Every Purpose is a nice one if you're a newer perennial gardener, and you're kind of trying to figure out the world of what sort of lant works well in what sort of area, what's a good border plant, what's a good ground cover plant, etc. And Perennials for American Gardens is also a pretty tonish book, and older one, but it has a lot of the variety, the cultivars listed in it. And finally, the late Joan Severa lived here in Fitchburg, and she wrote this wonderful book for perennial gardeners who are beginners. It's about her experience with starting a perennial garden and is really a ground up approach where choosing the site, getting the soil tested, how to do planting, how to do mulching, that kind of thing, and it has some really nice photos from her yard. So if you do have questions, you can reach me at the office by email or phone. Also, our master gardeners answer gardening questions at

the horticulture help line from May through October from 9

00 to noon, and you can call them at that number. You can also email them questions too. So, thank you for inviting me to speak to you today. Thanks for being a good audience.

applause