I think of catalogs as sources of both fantasy and planning. The fantasy part has to do with wishing I could grow certain plants in my region – tender plants that would be horrified at the several feet of snow now covering my garden, acid-loving plants who wouldn’t survive our prairie soil. When I was in North Carolina at the beginning of the month I saw forsythia in bloom. Honestly, it made my heart well up with joy: plants, real flowering plants, would appear in my garden too, eventually. (You may well ask, ‘Rinda, why do you keep living in Chicago if the winter always makes you fear the earth has died?’ to which I’d answer, ‘Spring isn’t spring without winter.’ But I’m weird.)
Fantasy is great, and who’d want to live without it, but it won’t pay the rent, as we know. So then I turn to planning. Now planning involves some knowledge of the present condition of the garden, which is where the notes and photos I took last summer come in. I need to know what worked and what didn’t, where there were holes in the garden, which parts of the garden looked blah, what stretches of the season needed color.
One good thing about catalog planning is that it saves you from impulse buying –you know, when you go to the big box store or the garden center and see something really pretty and buy it, even though it won’t really work in your yard or it’s been forced into bloom early or late. Catalogs let you study what’s going to bloom when, how big they’ll get , and what they like to grow in. For annuals, it’s not as crucial: if you’re buying annuals in flats or pots at a garden center, the rule of thumb is to buy plants that don’t have many blooms. If they’re flowering like crazy with so few roots, they’re high on chemicals and they may just flop in your yard or container. You’re better off buying plants with buds and maybe a bloom here or there (to check for color) and letting them grow in at home. When I studied annuals in my training, we were taught to pinch off any blooms when we planted them so the plant would put its energy into roots first.
Searching for perennials in catalogs is a great idea. In many of the online catalogs, you can search by exactly what your needs are. I just did a search for a plant that blooms in early spring in full sun in zone 5. The only one I got was Phlox subulata, Creeping Phlox, a plant I love. It’s good for edging borders and rock gardens, it spreads rapidly, and even in Chicago, it stays green all winter. A search for plants that bloom in spring in full to part shade yielded 29 plants, only one of which wouldn’t grow in my zone (although at $115/plant, I wouldn’t buy it if it would!). I could have modified my search to specify height, bloom color, and soil conditions.
The tricky part here, though, is that they may show three cultivars of the same plant, and it’s hard for you to know which ones are going to perform best for you. A case in point is Brunnera macrophylla, aka Siberian Bugloss (I like the Latin name better because ‘Bugloss’ just sounds too odd to me). Brunnera is a shade-loving plant with large, coarsely textured leaves. It blooms in the spring, with sprays of gorgeous tiny blue flowers, so that two or three planted together make a real impact in May. But some of the cultivars, which have great variegated leaves in the pictures and when you get them, don’t perform as well; the leaves fade to green, so you’ve paid two or three times the price of the straight species and the plant ends up little different. My personal experience is that you’re better off getting a plain Brunnera and using something else for variegated foliage, like the many lovely Hostas, the Variegated Solomon’s Seal, the Jacob’s Ladder ‘Stairway to Heaven,’ or even a variegated Carex (Sedge), like ‘Ice Dance.’
Another caution is that the pictures in the catalog generally show the plant in bloom, and it won’t be in bloom all season. For example, when I searched for early summer blooms in full to part sun in zone 5, one of the first (alphabetically) plants was Alchemilla mollis, Lady’s Mantle. The image shows the plant in full bloom, but this plant blooms for a short time in June and then it’s done. Most people plant it for the foliage, which is an attractive silvery green that holds moisture in droplets on the leaf. (I once heard it got its name from the alchemists’ belief that if you drank the droplets, you’d attract true love.) But the plant gets pretty tired looking in the heat of summer, and it does better in shade than sun, and the catalog isn’t going to shout that at you.
If you find a plant you like, use a search engine to get a much more complete description. My favorite plant information sites are the botanic gardens or university sites located in the zone where the plant will live. They’ll tell you more about how the plant performs in the garden and they’ll give you more images of the plant, in bloom and out.
Another reason to consult a botanical site is to discover how aggressive a plant may be. For example, the plant catalog description for Centaurea Montana, Mountain Bluet, says it will bloom all summer if you shear it to the ground after the first bloom (will you do that? ) but the Missouri Botanical Garden (‘Mobot,’ a great resource!) says, ” Can spread somewhat invasively by stolons to form colonies in optimum growing conditions (particularly in cool northern climates where it is more robust). Remove spent flower stalks to the ground after bloom. Sparse rebloom in late summer-early fall may occur. Plants need to be divided every 2-3 years.” So Mobot tells us the plant is aggressive and that rebloom is sparse. So if you’re looking to fill in a large space, you’ll know you don’t need to buy a lot of plants if you’re patient and willing to work in the garden. As much as we all love plant fantasies, when we’re putting plants into scarce space, we need to be realistic.
One last example: I searched for early fall blooming plants for part shade and came up with Kirengeshoma palmata, or Waxbells. It’s not a common plant, but it’s gorgeous, about 4’ tall, happiest in shade and acidic soils, with large, maple shaped leaves and surprisingly delicate yellow flowers in fall. The photo shows a large mass of plants. If you had a large mass of them, they’d be very dramatic. If you had one, it might well get lost at the back of a border. And you need to know what your soil will support: my soil is acidic and I have two of these plants. They don’t bloom or grow vigorously, although I still like them a lot. I’d like to get more, so they’d make more of a statement, so that may be one of the plants I acquire this season. If so, I’ll get at least 4 more so each of my plants will have two friends. I’ll see them better that way. Looking at the plant on the Mobot site, I see that the catalog has described it pretty accurately, but the Mobot photo is much more realistic, showing a few blooms and remarking that the plant is mostly grown for its foliage.
I hope this cautionary guide to catalog planning has been helpful. I think catalog buying is a little riskier than buying plants you hold first at the garden center, but that said, I’ve had some very good experiences with perennials from catalogs, and of course you can get bulbs and bare root shrubs pretty reliably on line.
This will be my last ‘expert blog,’ at least until the economy picks up. It’s been fun writing these, and I’ll continue to check in to the site and share my thoughts and pictures, respond to yours, and be a regular old member. I hope you’ll visit my website after mid-February when its new design will be up and running: view link Happy gardening to all!
