Life lessons in perennial flower borders

A perennial flower border can be a beautiful sight or a source of frustration. Most of the time, it’s some of each.

Photographers for garden books, websites and magazines show us gorgeous blooming flower borders backed by shrubbery or stylish fences, with perfectly arranged plants, blooming their hearts out. There are tall plants in back, mid-sized ones in the middle, and lower-growing ones in the front. Color contrasts and harmonies, leaf sizes and textures, all perfect. But that is a moment caught by the click of a camera, not a lasting condition.

Expecting our own borders to look that wonderful through a whole growing season is like expecting ourselves and everyone we know to look great every day, from toes to hair, for our whole lives.

Like us, perennial flower borders have good hair days – sometimes weeks – but also times when they are disheveled and frumpy.

The plants, not the gardener, have the final word. Perfection, the plants tell us, is possible but fleeting. Flowers bloom and wither. Some plants get too big and overwhelm their neighbors while others dwindle. A tree or nearby shrub grows and throws shade on the sun-lovers, inhibiting their floriferousness.

The idea that a perennial flower bed is “low maintenance” is a myth.

But when a perennial flower border is good, it is very, very good.

For a couple of weeks now, my backyard borders lift my spirits every time I walk down the garden path into the backyard. At the bottom of the path, I have to duck a little under the fragrant mock orange that is weighed down by its own abundant blossoms. But as I do, I’m surrounded by native fringe cup, mostly purple columbine, deep purple-blue perennial bachelors’ buttons, and this morning, two clumps of chives blooming on either side of the path’s end.

Going out the back door, a huge beauty bush grazes my head, and in the bed to my right, there’s a big clump of blooming Siberian iris, a hardy fuchsia with fat buds, a clump of sockeye-salmon colored Jupiter’s beard, perennial geraniums blooming early, more columbine, soft grey lambs’ ears, and pinks. A rogue hesperis has also popped up and is flowering.

I soak up all that pleasure to tide me over the coming gaps when the flowers blooming now meet their inevitable, shriveled end. Another generation of bloom will come in a few weeks. In between and after, the border may look like an unmade bed. Or, when I’ve cleared away the over-the-hill flowers, it may have bald spots.

There are two reasons for the common fondness for the practice of planting perennial flowerbeds. The first one is tradition. For well over a hundred years, the perennial flower border has been the sine qua non of English gardens, and English garden culture quickly jumped the Atlantic and took root in America.

But it wasn’t always so. Katherine White, in her wonderful book “Onward and Upward in the Garden,” writes that before the late 19^th century, “most English gardens, except cottage gardens, either imitated the elaborately formal gardens of France or Italy or were devoted to ‘bedding out’ – that is, to planting flowers (mostly annuals) in small beds to make artificial color patterns or geometrical designs.”

Then came two English garden writers – William Robinson and Gertrude Jekyll – who revolutionized gardening with a more naturalistic approach. White thanks Robinson and Jekyll for promoting ideas whose importance is now clearer than ever. Here’s how White explains their impact:

If we “strive to obtain a natural effect, to follow the contours of the land, or to study the region we live in so as to make our planting suit it, if we naturalize garden flowers in our woodlands or bring wild flowers into our gardens or strive to make our garden blend gradually into a forest or field, we probably owe our ideas, though all unconsciously, to (those) two great gardeners and garden writers . . .to make the garden, as Mr. Robinson put it, a reflection of ‘the beauty of the great garden of the world.’”

This sensibility has become an even more prominent part of the 21^st century perennial flower garden, where we are increasingly mixing native and non-native plants with an intention to honor “the great garden of the world.”

In our century, we’ve also heightened many gardeners’ awareness of a dimension Robinson and Jekyll didn’t worry about: concern about how the imperiled “great garden of the world” needs our gardens to provide habitat for pollinators, birds, insects, worms and soil microorganisms.

The second reason to persist with a perennial border is that eventually, we recognize that every plant that isn’t blooming is either resting or growing. Our borders are a lifetime invitation to acceptance, learning, experimentation, and constant adaptation to change.

Some life lessons may be best taught by flowers.

Jill Severn writes from her home in Olympia, where she grows vegetables, flowers, and a small flock of chickens. She loves conversation among gardeners. Start one by emailing her at  jill@theJOLTnews.com