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Hi, I’m Scott Reil and on behalf of expertvillage.com, I’d like to talk to you about perennial
gardens. Often when I see people with perennial gardens and they ask me, “Why doesn’t
my garden look like the ones in the magazines?” There is one real basic cause. It’s because
they’ve tended to buy their plants one at a time when they see a plant that they like
and then they come home with a pot in hand and they look around and they just stick it
in the first available spot in the dirt that looks like it will fit. That’s not the way
to get a really great looking perennial garden. Mine started off with a basic plan and just
a rough drawing, I’m not talking an architectural to scale drawing here, you just need to start
with some basic ideas of how much space you have, how many plants you want to fit into
that space, and how it’s all eventually going to lay out. And here’s a couple of
things to keep in mind. How big is that plant eventually going to get. Now a lot of people
would buy this little nepeta plant in little small one gallon pot and think that’s how
big it gets but this thing gets to be three feet across, it really spreads out. So know
how big that plant’s going to get before you put it in the space. The other things
to think about are, how are my plants going to look together when they are out of flower?
Perennial gardens tend to come in and out of flower at different times of the season
with different things. So the foliage is an important thing to think about when you’re
doing your layout too, contrast your low or horizontal plants with more vertical spiky
plants to help give you a different look even when things aren’t in flower. Our final
thing to think about when you are laying out your garden is even though it’s a perennial
garden it needs some bones for some other part of the year and structures. Like garden
structures that my clematis is growing on and shrubs like the holly over here, add bones
to the garden that are there even in the winter months when everything else is asleep and
beneath the snow. So remember, thinking a little bit beforehand about your garden layout
is going to make your perennial garden a year around success.