shout out for Phlox Jeana. The best care free phlox. Immune to mildew. Upright summer phlox. Blooms for months. Pollinators love it.
3 Likes
I’ll look for it. Phlox never does well for me.
1 Like
This year i added more purple iris. Glad i have some of the old fashioned type now a friend gave me.
1 Like
I’m trying Jeana here first time this year in about 50% shade, not sure it will work. I also have white David that deer really love.
1 Like
It is years later now and i wonder if everyone found the things they need and want. I feel im growing some great perennial flowers now.
2 Likes
They won’t restock and have their lineup available for sale for a couple more months, but @mamuang helped me discover this source for bulk iris flower bulbs, and @randyks seconded the recommendation. They have many more types of flowers available.
3 Likes
Gaura is always a go to for me. Drought tolerant and low maintenance. Bees (including natives) love it.
2 Likes
Is there a county native sale near you? That’s the best place to find no maintenance natives. I don’t know your area, but likely most of the American meadow flowering and grass perennials are native to you. The bulbs in this post are pretty, but they only bloom for a short period. A mix of spring, all summer and later fall blooms will keep you oogling from April to November. If you don’t have a good county native sale, you can buy plugs at Prairie moon nursery if you need to cover a lot of space.
I couldn’t read the whole thread but saw the mint concerns- if you have a larger area or a lot of root competition, mountain mints are wonderful. Mine are planted around other natives that like to spread so they’re controlled. They’re pretty, native and pollinators love them. Mix in neat grasses with the flowers to make them pop and have pretty fall color- little bluestems are by far my favorite. In addition to the natives mentioned in the beginning, easy sure-bet native flower additions are asters, liatris (bulbs- plant bags in the fall, I think it’s too late now), amsonias, coreopsis.
Edit- I somehow forgot goldenrod and penstemons in that short list! Be sure to get non-aggressive goldenrod if it’s a small space- like solidago nemoralis or caesia. All penstemons are awesome for late spring/early summer blooms
4 Likes
Is perennial here perennial as in herbaceous plants that die to the ground each winter or perennial as in not annual? I’m gonna go with the second since it serves my purposes better.
I’ve had mixed luck around here with a lot of the traditional true perennials and annuals over the years. More and more, I’m leaning into the idea of only planting either shrubby perennials that don’t die back, or herbaceous perennials that are more than a foot tall and tend to be thick growing. Everything else is just too high maintenance here in eastern NC.
We’ve got dozens of annual weed species that’ll pop up in any bare soil at any time of year, winter included, so sowing annuals, even self-sowing ones, means hand weeding, which I don’t have time for. Low creeping plants will get bermudagrass, bahiagrass, horsenettle, Virginia creeper, and poison ivy growing up through it and smothering it. Most herbaceous perennials get smothered in the spring by cool-season grasses and then later in the year dog fennel and pokeweed take over. Wood sorrel, amaranth, and red sorrel are excellent at colonizing mulch, so even plants that are well mulched need to be tall and thick enough to fight off those weeds.
I have a slowly-expanding list of battle-hardened flowers.
Butterfly bushes, especially the bigger varieties
Tithonia–one of the very few annuals I plant.
Ox-eyed daisy
Bee balms
Milkweeds, but only in a “naturalized” setting where they’re growing in an overgrown corner of the lawn
Lantanas, especially if they are hardy enough to come back after winter
Daffodils, these work because unlike summer bulbs they get going before most of the weeds but are also gone by midyear so I can control late-season weeds that normally choke out gladiolus and irises.
Woody shrubs like azalea, forsythia, rose of sharon, osmanthus, mock-orange, gardenia, and loropetalum.
Small flowering trees like redbud, mimosa, Arroyo sweetwood, Omeo gum, Kentucky yellowwood, and fringetree.
Hardy hybrid passionflowers
I have high hopes for, but have not yet tested:
Perennial sunflowers
Rudbeckias
Ginger-lilies
Confederate rose
Aloysia
Cassia corymbosa
Alstromaria
Erythrina x bidwillii
Itoh peony
Swamp mallows
1 Like
From your additions list:
Rudbeckias tend to grow and spread like weeds. If you can just clear a little area to let it establish, you should be fine and they reseed readily.
Hibiscus moschuetos is beautiful. I grow it in a controlled setting, but I see it growing around nature centers at the edge of dense forests, so it should be able to handle the weeds. Obviously, it gets 6’ tall which helps.
Deep rooted native grasses should be able to survive the invasive competition. Bluestem has epically deep roots and love the crappiest soil you have (big and little), Indiangrass, switchgrass if you have an area that doesn’t dry out too too much though it will be fine just grow taller with more moisture, bottlebrush (elymus hystrix) I don’t think is super deep rooted, but it is well rooted and can eliminate competition with its roots and reseed. There are many more, but those are readily available.
I’ve reworked areas that were overrun by twitch/couch grass and it certainly was brutal. But, just the first year when you have to clear the area and then continually weed to remove anything that regrew. Second year is much easier as things are growing in. Third year is very low maintenance, as the natives grow in as living mulch (assuming you plant densely and ignore tag spacing), so you have substantially fewer weeds and they’re shaded, so not that big of a deal.
3 Likes