Perennial Garden – Design Notes and Tips

In hardly any other garden style is "knowing where" so crucial as in a perennial garden. This is how you ensure that each species is properly showcased and can display its charm. It's possible to group perennials together and plan paths, lawns, or even waterways in between.

The deciding factors for placing perennials are their growth height and inflorescence. For nothing is more disappointing than a plant that hides its captivating blooms in the shadow of a neighbor.

If you don't have a flat garden, you can also use existing height differences to highlight the various plants.

You can let your creativity run wild when designing your perennial garden, but with good planning, you'll ensure peace and harmony.

For example, when selecting plants, you can limit yourself to flowering perennials and either immerse individual beds in a sea of color or divide them into distinct color groups, which can be particularly charming.

For instance, hydrangeas bloom blue in acidic soils and more pink in alkaline ones, making them wonderfully combinable with the equally blue cranesbill, the blue Siberian iris, or the pink-flowering 'Tinkerbell' lilac.

In white, garden jasmine, spirea, some shrub roses, and of course daisies shine brightly. But naturally, you can choose your perennials in all imaginable colors.

A perennial garden can also be designed with grasses to create a particularly elegant look. The various leaf colors of the grasses are just as enchanting as their wind-swept inflorescences.

Small-growing grasses include sweet vernal grass, variegated smooth oat, red dwarf sedge, or the graceful mosquito grass. Medium-height options include blue moor grass, northern sea oats, and red tussock grass.

And the highlight in the perennial bed can be pampas grass, as well as large-growing bamboo species.

If you're looking to create a perennial garden from scratch, it's a good idea to prepare it in the fall. During this time, lay out your beds in their rough shape and establish the desired structures and forms for your garden. You can also incorporate any necessary humus now, allowing everything to settle and mature properly before you begin planting your perennials in the spring.

For each new addition to your perennial garden, dig a sufficiently large planting hole to accommodate it. If the beds become too wide to reach the perennials from all sides, it's better to space them out enough so you can access each individual plant for care.

When starting a new perennial garden, try to avoid planting too many plants. Most perennials need to be divided in the fall to maintain their beauty and health. This means that from the second year onwards, you'll have plenty of "new" plants to supplement or replace older, less attractive ones.

And if you like, you can always enhance and beautify your perennial garden with marigolds, primroses, and other annual bloomers.