Improve Your Home With Perennial Plants
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Some people can't wait for the first sunny day to rush out to local greenhouses or home improvement stores for blooming plants to add a touch of color to their spring and summer landscape.
But not everyone enjoys the spring ritual of planting annuals - from the early blooming pansies, to those that grace yards with color all summer like marigolds, zinnias, impatiens and petunias. Annuals, no matter how much they add to your landscape, are only there for a season before dying. And they can't be expected to produce the same variety that you planted even though some of these annuals are actually capable of reseeding.
If you're one of those people who don't enjoy a lot of gardening, but wish you had flowers, your home can benefit from perennial plantings instead. You can basically just plant them once and then basically forget about them if you choose plants well suited for your locality and plant them where they receive the optimum light and moisture for their type.
Unlike annuals, perennials return year after year. Many plants will become larger and more attractive. Others will spread through rhizomes, creating new bulbs, or through seeds, so that a single plant can, over time, become many that fill up flower beds without additional work.
Among the hardest working of these self-propagating plants are some of the best known. And while spring plants would need to be set in the fall, for this summer you can still buy bagged or potted varieties to add to your lawn.
Before taking out your checkbook, inspect your planting area first. Unlike in the early spring when trees do not leaf out yet, when looking for summer plants you'll have to consider foliage and the effect it will have because most areas are usually sunny.
Probably one of the easiest plants to think about is day lilies if you can find a spot that is going to be mostly sunny. Newer varieties, aside from the original stock, which was tall, orange and only bloomed once, offer a lot of options while still possessing the hardiness of the original. From nearly black to the palest pinks and yellows, these are among the colors you can find the day lilies of today. You can opt for plants that are much shorter and those that will bloom again as well. Their soil demands are not high, so you don't have to do a lot of digging and cultivating to get an area ready for them. Looking like ornamental grasses, they will extend their rhizomes and spread and can quickly fill in beds with their foliage then cover themselves in blooms by mid summer if left with room to grow.
For shady areas, hostas in all their varieties are an easy choice. They rely on their foliage for their beauty, as their blooms are generally small, but the leaves come in many sizes and color combinations. Many have clumps of leaves that are just about the size of an average hand in variations of greens from yellowish to blue-tinted, or variegated with white or multi-tones. They may also be smaller leaves or giant leaves as large as plates. Periodically, you can dig for them and break them apart for new plants as you want to because they will make larger clumps of leaves each year.
You can transform your yard into a summer beauty with little work and just two types of plants, and all this without digging out the gardening tools every spring.
Article Source: Articlelogy.com
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