CHAPTER III
HARDY PERENNIALS

A perennial is a plant that comes up year after year, and increases as it grows older. We will tell you how to grow fourteen of the best, and when you have succeeded with those you can find hundreds more described in ‘The English Flower Garden’ and other well-known books. Your parents and grandparents can remember when all the beautiful herbaceous or perennial plants were hardly to be found in gardens, and everyone was content with the straight rows of red, blue, and yellow, the ignorant gardener will still inflict on you if you let him. In those days bulbs were planted in autumn and dug up in spring, to make way for Geraniums, Calceolarias, and Lobelias. Everyone grew the same things, had an ugly clash of colour at the same moment, and bare brown borders for the greater part of the year. Then came some of the great gardeners of thirty years ago, who set the gardening world ablaze with their reforms and their audacities. They told people how dull and stupid their gardens were, and how to make them beautiful and interesting. It was not their fault if some of their disciples ran away with the idea that a herbaceous border was the easiest thing in the world to manage, and were grievously disappointed to find that it was not. As a matter of fact, the incompetent gardener and the local nurseryman had known very well what they were about all the time. It is expensive, but not difficult, to stuff your borders full of Dutch bulbs in November, and full of little plants out of pots in May. You could do it yourself with money and a length of string tied to two sticks, for you must get your lines straight. But, then, think of all the beautiful plants you would never see in your garden—plants that, to come to their full beauty, must be left undisturbed until they show you who understand them that they are ready for your attention, and require fresh soil or possibly division. In most gardens there are some beds that are planted twice a year, because a show of spring and autumn colour is wanted in them; but in all gardens managed with any skill or knowledge there are now also herbaceous borders, where you will find all the plants we are going to tell you about, many other perennials for which we have no room, and some annuals, hardy and half hardy. The finest bit of gardening known to one of the authors is the herbaceous border at Hampton Court, and she must admit that she knows neither the Palace nor its pictures nearly as well as the noble groups of plants that all through the summer and autumn make a blaze of colour there. If you have any good garden of hardy perennials within reach, you should visit it at different times of the year, and try to learn some lesson about the habit and arrangement of the plants. You will come back to your own garden in despair, but that is better for you than staying at home and being too easily satisfied. It is well to know the best that is done in any art or industry one tries to practise.

The hardy perennials we are going to describe will flourish in any English garden that has good, well-dressed soil, and is open to the sun part of the day. In choosing which you will grow you must consider their colours, their height, their flowering season, and the rate at which they increase. You should not give a delicate-looking plant like a Columbine a coarse spreading neighbour that will choke it. Nearly all herbaceous plants are greedy feeders, and require a deep, well-dug soil. If you cannot have manure worked in, perhaps you can buy a little bone-meal and soot. In any case, you should dig the ground well over before planting, break up hard lumps, and remove large stones.

Hardy Perennials.

Primrose and Polyanthus.

There are more than a hundred kinds of Primrose, or Primula; nearly all are hardy, and many grow in clusters on a single stalk. We are only going to tell you about the common Polyanthus, which grows in big clusters, and about the coloured garden Primrose, which is mostly found with single flowers, like the yellow Primrose of our fields and hedges. Perhaps you have heard of Peter Bell, and how