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| Photo Credit: Felder Rushing |
| This perennial Hosta provides a wonderful touch as a potted plant next to seating. |
There’s a growing interest in cultivating perennials in almost every American garden, and it’s easy to understand why. Offering colorful blooms and year-round appeal with great variety of foliage and textural effects, perennials can serve as the workhorses in your garden and satisfy just about every design need you may have. But with all the thousands of types that are available, it can be overwhelming to choose what’s right for your garden. Here are a few tips that might help.
I’m big on mixed plantings. No more 100-foot-long beds of nothing but perennials or roses or dwarf evergreens! Monoculture breeds monotony. It also encourages pest or disease problems to come in and decimate your entire garden. The name of the game should be “interplanting.” Perennials can beautifully coexist with shrubs, trees, bulbs, annuals, vines and even vegetables. | Add Photo to Journal |  | | Photo Credit: Felder Rushing | | The informal effect of this purple coneflower on either side of the fence is enchanting. |
Think of designing your garden like decorating a room: The trees and overhead garden structures can be the ceiling, the groundcovers and the lawn are the floors, vertical structures and plants used for architectural purposes can be the walls. I think of shrubs, small trees, annuals – and especially perennials – as the furniture.
You should consider height, seasonal interest, color, texture and plant combinations when conceptualizing your garden room. Most importantly, you have to make sure the plants you choose are well-suited to the area of the garden you’re thinking of planting them in. You wouldn’t put a baby grand piano in the bathroom, right?
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