Making a Garden of Perennials

by W. C. Egan

Place your flower beds along the walks, at the house, or along the lot lines, but do not clutter the center of your lawn with them. An open grass plot adds apparent size and dignity to any place. Give as much open sunlight as possible. Only early spring bloomers, like the hepaticas and trilliums, grow in what we call shade—though at the time of their growth and bloom they have the sunlight through the leafless tree branches. Do not make a bed where the drainage is bad or where water will stand in it during the winter. Tile draining will improve the bed under almost any circumstances.

Keep away from large trees. A vigorous elm, and a perennial cannot eat and drink out of the same dish and both grow fat. The perennial will be the one to suffer, mostly from lack of moisture. If you have planted near a tree or lack of space compels you to do so, take a sharp spade and, each spring, cut deeply all along the edge of the flower bed nearest the tree, and pull out from the bed all the small roots you can without disturbing the plants. This will help it for a time, but the elm will invade the bed again and the operation must be repeated. This applies to beds within eight or ten feet of a tree. For any bed much nearer, the cutting would be apt to injure the tree, and the growth in the bed would be a poor one.

Where the grounds are large and there is ample room for large beds at the borders, with an open lawn in front, flowering shrubs may be used as a background for perennials, but the growth of the shrubs requires frequent removals of the perennials further forward, and a frequent renewal of the plant food which the shrub is sharing. This method requires more watering on account of the double duty required of the soil.

Avoid fancy or geometrical shapes. They belong, when allowable, to formal gardens where tender bedding plants are used. Along walks, rectangular beds may be made, but against buildings or boundary lines, while the rear line may be comparatively straight, the front should be undulating, having long sweeping bays and promontories. No short curves should exist. They interfere with the lawn-mower. When it is desirable to face a boundary border with a walk, then, of course, the front line of a bed should be straight.

A background of vines or flowering shrubs is worth striving for, especially to set off white flowers like sweet rocket

Some perennials require to be planted two feet apart, and in some, like peonies, three feet is close enough, for in time their tops will meet. Eighteen inches apart is enough to allow for the majority and some slender ones require but one foot. All this should be taken into consideration when determining the width of the bed.

Starting with the proposition that the average plant requires eighteen inches headroom, and that the first row may be planted six inches within the bed at the front—nine to twelve is better—and the second one back eighteen inches, and six from the back, we find that with rows two plants deep it requires a bed two feet and a half in width. This should be the narrowest allowance you should make. In a four-foot bed you can place them three deep, and one five and a half takes four plants. In other words, you increase your width in jumps of eighteen inches at a time. While this is not actually necessary, it is best and applies only to the widest and narrowest points. The intervening curved lines will vary from this measurement but it makes no difference, because you do not plant in straight rows from back to front as one would cabbages.

In planting at boundary lines or at buildings, the taller ones should be used at the back, but the semi-tall ones—say three feet in height—should occasionally be brought well toward the front in order to avoid stiffness and to add irregularity to the general effect. If a house or fence is at the back, flowering vines like the Clematis paniculata, or C. flammula, or any annual flowering vine, may be used here and there. In detached beds which may be seen from all sides, the taller plants are set in the middle.

The effect is much better if you plant in groups of four, six, or more of one kind. It relieves the effect of spottiness. Plant in an irregular manner so as to avoid stiffness or lumpiness, and let one group run in behind another. If you plant large groups in a pear-shaped form with the narrow stem end slightly curved and let the larger end of the adjoining pear-shaped group run up to the narrow stem of its neighbor, you will produce the effect I suggest. The plants you buy, being small, if planted as suggested will not occupy all the ground the first year. These spaces may be carpeted with annuals for a year or so, or planted with gladioli, lilies or Hyacinth candicans.