Do you want a garden buzzing with excitement and brimming with bold blossoms, heady perfumes, and exotic foliage? Or just looking to diversify your vegetable garden and enhance pollinator activity? Either way, and for everything in between, perennials deliver. Besides making vegetable gardens more attractive, perennials make gardens healthier and more robust, increasing yields. They attract beneficial insects and beaucoups of the butterflies, bees, hummingbirds we all love.
Perennials are extremely versatile, offering something for just about any location—sunny or shady, moist or dry—and any environment—hot or cold, humid or arid. Not only good looking, many are tough, hard-working problem solvers. Whether an area of erosion, barren soil where lawn grasses dare not tread, a wet, boggy pond perimeter, or a drought prone zone, perennials rise to the challenge. Just be sure to select plants suited for your Zone and soil type.
Massing or grouping varieties will maximize impact while keeping your garden from looking too busy. And staggering bloom times keeps your garden—and vases—full of colorful flowers. Pick perennials with foliage of contrasting shapes and textures to maintain interest when they are not in bloom. And remember the rule for brilliant borders: shorter plants in front, medium plants in the middle, and taller ones towards the rear.
Although herbaceous perennials die back each year, they faithfully return year after year, bigger and better.