perennials bed?


Short-lived perennials and the lily leaf beetle may leave you looking for options and replacements in your perennial beds


W


hen you plant a perennial it is with a sense of a job well done and taken care of. We often


don’t realize that some perennials are just plain short-lived. One reason for this is that many of the short livers readily self-sow giving us the illusion that they have long lives when in reality it is their offspring that come back year after year. Take many types of delphiniums,


which may live three or four years but are generous self-sowers. The same is true of lupines and columbines, gaillar- dia and rudbeckia. Shasta daisies, core- opsis and even perennial flax will gradu-


28 • Home and Gardener Living


ally disappear unless they are refreshed from time to time. Also on the list of short livers are bien-


nials, including hollyhocks and sweet William. These plants, too, will tend to self sow and many therefore appear to be perennials but are, in fact, biennials that take two years to flower, then die. This leads to their tendency to produce copi- ous numbers of seeds. Often, many of these ephemeral plants


simply live their brief lives and then pass from the garden. If you want to keep their presence, it’s a good idea to let them go to seed and even to replace


them every couple of years so that you won’t have a big hole in the garden when their time is up. Longer-lived perennials may seem


to be the answer to low maintenance prayers, but some of these plants may demand division every few years. Excep- tions to this would be the really long livers such as peonies, which seldom require division, and hostas. The gas plant, Dictamnus alba, is another great plant to leave undisturbed for a long time. It has a clumping habit that slowly expands and each year makes it more spectacular.


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Is it time to refresh that


Blue flax (Linum) and bright gaillardia both put on a brief but georgeous show but need to be renewed if they don’t successfully self-sow.


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