My favorite selections from a year of experimentation
The wet spring and early summer has been a blessing and curse in the border this year. Moist-loving perennials like Mondarda and Eupatorium have swelled to gigantic proportions, growing several feet higher than they've grown in the past two years. All the while, my drier-loving perennials have melted with fungus and mildew. I've just finished ripping out several dozen fungus-covered Perovskia and Agastache ‘Black Adder’. It’s funny, because if you asked me last year what kind of plants would be on my list of “plants of the future”—that is, climate change worthy plants--I probably would have listed those two. But one wet season and they are gone.
I have long complained that summers in Washington, D.C. area are essentially subtropical. While perennial gardeners in cooler climates like Maine, England, and the Netherlands enjoy spectacular bonanzas of July and August blooms, we humidity-bound gardeners watch all but the most thuggish of our perennials flop and generally poop out. Of course, it is entirely possible to have a beautiful late season perennial garden in the mid-Atlantic; it is just hard to have both a beautiful early season and late season perennial garden here—particularly for space-challenged gardens. Our growing season is so stretched out (with a thirty degree temperature differential); what looks good in May most definitely does not look good in August and vice versa.
So this year, I've invested heavily in annuals and tropicals to pump up the late season border. I can’t tell if my foray into annuals and tropical is a strategic master-stroke or a sign that I have slipped too deep into horticultural self-indulgence. Whatever my diagnosis, I've learned quite a bit this year about combining these plants in perennial garden—including quite a few missteps (such as giant Colocasias shading out half a dozen sun-loving plants). But there have been enough happy accidents that I thought I’d share a few of the better moments. I've seeded almost two dozen different plants this year and tried a range of different tropicals. Here are my favorites:
