Most owners of suburban areas dream of a garden, the maintenance of which requires minimal effort and time. Today, there are a wide variety of perennials on sale, and it is quite difficult to navigate this huge assortment, not only for a beginner, but also for an experienced gardener.
So how do you choose flowers that are unpretentious for the garden, but at the same time bright, beautiful and original?
External conditions
When choosing perennials that you want to "settle" on your site, start from what kind of soil it has, how many sunny and shady places. You should not place sun-loving plants in shaded and humid areas, in such conditions they may survive, but they are unlikely to please you with their appearance, and even more so with flowering. A simple example is the most unpretentious flowers for the garden: varietal yarrow, woolly stakhis, better known to gardeners as "sheep's ears", various wormwoods, such as Steller, Schmidt or Louisiana.
These sun-lovers can easily endure even not very long periods of drought. Such perennials are suitable for open sunny areas and sandy soils. These plants will thrive and won't die even if you're only in the garden on the weekends and can only water them once a week.
If you provide the flowers with the conditions they are used to, then they will need much less care.
A beautiful garden at any time of the year
Every gardener dreams that from early spring to late autumn his plot would be blooming and attractive. To make this dream come true, choosing unpretentious flowers for the garden, it is worth choosing them in such a way that they bloom alternately, and not simultaneously, and reach the peak of their beauty. In addition, it is desirable that they mask certain outwardly not very attractive features or shortcomings of each other.
Greig's, Foster's, Kaufman's tulips and other small-bulbous plants, such as chionodoxes, muscari, crocuses, do not require annual digging and delight us with their flowering, while others are just waking up. But by the end of spring, they fade, and their foliage withers and turns yellow. It does not look very beautiful, but it is impossible to cut off the aerial part of the plants. All this will help to disguise aquilegia - very unpretentious flowers for the garden, the photo of which is presented below, as well as such decorative leafy plants as cuffs, hosts, lungworts and darmers.
At the end of spring they are all activefaded early bulbs develop and cover under their foliage.
Let's take a closer look at which of the perennial unpretentious plants can decorate the shaded areas of the garden.
Decorate a shady corner
Practically in any garden there are places deprived of the gardener's attention. The reason for this is the constant shading and the small amount of sunlight falling on it. In addition, if they tried to plant any “decent” plant there, it either died or looked painful and unsightly. However, even such shady corners can decorate unpretentious garden flowers that prefer to grow in the shade. Shade-loving perennials are mostly herbaceous plants with beautiful and succulent foliage that prefer moist soils.
In autumn, the above-ground part of them dies off, and the underground one successfully hibernates, and foliage appears from it in spring.
Primroses
In early spring, when the trees are not yet covered with foliage and the sun warms up such areas, they will delight with their flowering:
- snowdrops (Galanthus);
- Galler Corydalis;
- scilla (Scilla);
- Siberian and European kandyki.
These flowers are perennials. For the garden, they are unpretentious and not troublesome, since they can be planted both together and in separate species groups. All of these plants quickly build up nests of tubers and bulbs, and besides, they spread well by self-sowing. Their foliage dies off imperceptibly and very quickly, due to whichno need for any disguise.
Mid-Spring Flowers
After the primroses, botanical tulips and violets, brunners and wild peonies, bergenia and warty irises, colorful decorative lilies of the valley bloom - all these flowers are unpretentious. For a garden with old trees, where there are many shady corners, they will be a wonderful decoration. All of these plants are perennials, moreover, they reproduce well by self-sowing. The wild peony, unlike its cultural relatives, prefers to grow and blooms beautifully in the shade or partial shade. About brunners, known to many gardeners under the name "forget-me-nots", it should be said especially.
Small bluish-blue flowers of this plant really resemble forget-me-nots and fade in spring. But the leaves of most varieties are able to decorate the garden until frost. Today, these unpretentious flowers for the garden are represented by a variety of varieties, including variegated varieties.
Will delight in summer and autumn
In summer and up to mid-autumn, winter-hardy perennials such as multi-colored styloid phloxes, hostas, astilbes, black cohosh (black cohosh), ornamental ferns and pachysandra look great in heavily shaded areas.
Styloid phlox do well in shade and are the first of their kind to bloom. Fragrant flowers of delicate blue, pink and white shades look like moths and delight the eye for several weeks.
Hosts have long been loved by gardeners, only picking plants for planting in the shade,it is better to stay on varieties with light or blue foliage. Astilbes are very beautiful perennial flowers for the garden. Unpretentious plants with elegant openwork foliage, if chosen correctly, can delight with their flowering all summer. In addition, breeders have created many varieties with inflorescences of various colors and shapes.
But cimicifuga, better known as "black cohosh", will decorate the garden with its carved, a bit like astilba foliage throughout the summer, and will please with its flowering in autumn.
Various buzulniks - ligulars will effectively decorate shady areas. There are many varieties of this plant, there are green and red, and even brown-chocolate leaves, like, for example, Osiris Café Noir. In our gardens, the Przhevalsky buzulnik is most often found with strongly dissected green leaves and tall, sunny yellow peduncles growing up to a meter.
In light shade
Most of the listed shade-loving perennials grow well in partial shade. Decorate a slightly shaded area and unpretentious flowers for the garden, such as aquilegia, doronicum and dicentra. And if doronicum will delight you with yellow flowers similar to daisies, then aquilegia petals today come in all colors and shades. Dicentra flowers can also be different - pink, cherry, white or bicolor, and even after flowering, its large decorative leaves look great.
Decorates areas in light shade and such a ground cover perennial aslungwort. It blooms rather modestly - with small, bell-like flowers, but it is decorative all season thanks to its leaves. In different varieties, they can be completely silver, with a small green border around the edge, or covered with silver spots of various sizes.
Ground cover plants such as creeping gum and periwinkle are good for filling empty spaces.
It is important to remember when planting such plants that they are quite aggressive and, if you do not limit their growth, for example, by planting them in a dug pot without a bottom, they will try to capture the entire nearby territory.
On a sunny meadow…
If the site is sunny and almost never in the shade, then perennials such as echinacea, heliopsis, ornamental varieties of yarrow and stonecrop, shrub asters, daylilies, wormwood, as well as ornamental grasses will grow and develop well on it.
All listed perennials are drought tolerant and do not require frequent and regular watering.
We tried to tell you which flowers are the most unpretentious for the garden, but only you can choose and grow the most suitable plants for you and your site!
