The following article is from Rebeccas Garden and was featured on the HGTV website.
Foolproof perennials can be the staple of your garden, giving you enduring color and interest with little or no effort on your part. Here are Rebecca Kolls’s top-ten easiest perennials to grow. Scoring high on the charts for disease resistance, hardiness and low maintenance, these perennials will brighten your garden for years to come.
6. Bleeding Heart (Dicentra sp.)
Bleeding heart is an excellent candidate for a shady garden. The dangling, heart-shaped flowers line up side-by-side from a single stem that gracefully arches over the foliage. Typically it blooms in the spring, but the fern-leaf variety blooms all summer long. Bleeding hearts come in pink, white and red and grow to a height of one to three feet. Zones 3 to 8.
7. Daylily (Hemerocallis sp.)
One of the hardiest perennials you can grow, this plant is great for hot, dry sites. Large trumpet-shaped blooms come in many colors; they bloom over a long period of the season (early, mid or late summer), but each flower lasts only a day. Select a variety of daylilies, and you can have color in the garden from early summer to fall. Propagate by root division every few years. USDA Zones 3 to 10.
8. Delphinium (Delphinium sp.)
Delphinium blooms in early summer with tall, stately spikes that add strong vertical accents in the garden. Deadheading the blooms shortly after they fade will give you a second flush of color in late summer. Usually seen in blue, delphiniums also come in purple, red, pink, yellow and white. Give them full sun and plant two feet apart. Stake the taller types, which often can reach six feet. USDA Zones 3 to 8.
9. Yarrow (Achillea sp.)
A great plant for hot, dry and poor soil conditions, yarrow comes in white, yellow and pink. Various cultivars and species produce flowers that are anywhere from a few inches to several feet tall. Give this plant full sun and place the taller types two feet apart. Propagate by stem cuttings in midsummer or by division every few years in the spring or fall.
10. Purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea)
Another great perennial for hot, dry and poor-soil conditions, the coneflower also handles light shade. Besides the common rosy-hued species, cultivars offer a few other shades including white. Space plants two feet apart. Coneflowers reseed themselves; they can also be propagated from seeds or by division. Zones 3 to 9.
These perennials are all welcome in my gardens. Most of these I use in flower arrangements.
Five more easy to grow perennials from this program are listed in an article at http://thegardenersrake.com/top-ten-perennials-to-grow-part-one
Give perennials the site and soil they prefer the most, and then be patient, says Kolls. “The first year they sleep,” she says, “the second year they creep, and the third year they leap with color.”
Tags: easy to grow perennials, fool proof perennial, Purple Coneflower, yarrow, Daylily, Delphinium, Bleeding Heart
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