A book for the holidays: Armitage’s Garden Perennials

If you’ve grown ‘Margarita,’ the chartreuse-leaved sweet potato vine, or the Sunlover coleus series, or the red-leaved fountain grasses, ‘Prince’ or ‘Princess,’ you can thank Allan Armitage, plant guru and professor at the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia, for introducing them to the garden trade. Armitage is the author of several gardening books, including the newly revised, “Armitage’s Garden Perennials,” (Timber Press, 348 pages, $49.95). This detailed reference book, sprinkled with a little plant history, suggestions for plant combinations, and his quirky humor, covers more than 1250 of the best perennials, including garden mainstays and new introductions, along with zone hardiness and cultural recommendations.

“I can’t write about this stuff without growing it,” says Armitage, who has evaluated perennials in Montreal, Canada, East Lansing, Michigan, and in Athens, Georgia, where he oversees the university’s research gardens, evaluating new plants from flower breeders around the world.
He took a break from plant research, travel and lectures to talk by phone recently about his latest book.
Did you drop any plants since the first edition was published in 2000?

As I was writing the book, a dozen new cultivars of echinacea [coneflower] and epimedium were hitting the trial garden. The new cultivars tend to push out the older ones, but I didn’t want to throw out all the old plants that were still good. Let’s face it, in a five-year period there may be 1000 new plants of which 100 stick. For example, I still recommend some of the older coreopsis, like ‘Zagreb,’ which is spectacular. And ‘Goldsturm’ Rudbeckia, which is planted at just about every corner gas station—it’s one of those plants with staying power that I couldn’t drop. The rudbeckias in general are great, and there are a lot of newer ones that are very nice, like ‘Herbstonne,’ and the taller ‘Henry Eilers,’ a Rudbeckia subtomentosa, which has very narrow petals and is an attractive plant.

So, which perennials are your top picks?
How can I do that? Well, my favorites are different today than they were six months ago or last year. I’m looking at new perennials every day and it’s impossible to try every single one. Breeders are doing a lot of interesting work with native plants, which we call “nativars,” [a combination of native and cultivar]. Beyond perennials...what I love right now are Japanese maples, hypericum (St. John’s Wort), hibiscus, vines—I’m a vine guy.
What’s a workhorse perennial for full sun?
False indigo [Baptisia] is definitely on my list. It’s a native plant that, once established, is a consistent performer that will persist for 20 years or more. There are at least a half-dozen colors and new hybrids and more are coming. It’s really a classic perennial that grows 3 to 4 feet tall and wide and has few insect or disease problems. However, it’s a plant that has very little joy in the retail setting because it looks like a stick in a container, so few people know what it has to offer. I’m also enamored with hardy hibiscus this year. There are so many fine [hibiscus] out there and breeders are working on some so they’re more compact at 3 to 4 feet tall. ‘Cranberry Crush’ is a good example at 3 feet tall and wide with bright rosy-red flowers. It’s reliable year after year and the only downside is that Japanese beetles occasionally bother it.
What’s your favorite plant for shade?
Well, that could change tomorrow, but today it’s epimedium. There are so many [epimedium] to choose from. They have handsome flowers in spring, they’re drought-tolerant and they make a great groundcover. Pulmonarias are a big deal for the shade garden, too. They’ve been around a long time and they’ve got really handsome foliage. Hellebores, too, are definitely one of the ones I love for shade. They have always been good plants, but the flowers were hard to see. ‘Ivory Prince’ was the first with upward facing flowers and there’s ‘Pink Frost,’ both very good. They just may be hard to find. And, Northern maidenhair fern—you can’t do much better than that in the ferns.

What made you include things like cannas and dahlias, which aren’t really perennial?

Yes, they have to be dug up and stored and replanted in the spring if you garden north of zones 6 or 7, but they’re outstanding plants, many with new colors and eye-catching, bold foliage that make a great contribution to perennial garden design.

You recently moved into a smaller house with a much smaller space for a garden. How are you whittling down your collection?

I had a spectacular garden at the old house and was growing a lot of tiarellas, lungwort and other shade plants, but this new garden is tiny and has more sun. The ‘before’ was pretty awful but it’s been fun--I stuff things in. I have absolutely no design in my yard, but I know enough about plants to know what they need and where to place them. The new place is already overrun. That’s what gardening is about. Don’t take it too seriously—it should be a pleasure, not a pain.

Check it out at http://www.timberpress.com/

Good Reads for Winter

Garden books may come and go but one of that will always have a place on my bookshelves is Elements of Garden Design by landscape designer Joe Eck. He and Wayne Winterrowd (who passed away earlier this year), co-wrote A Year at North Hill.  They transformed North Hill, their garden in Vermont, over the last 30 years into an incredible setting. Eck has written other books, but this one, published in 1996 in paperback, is 164 pages, sprinkled with black and white illustrations of his garden and divided into simple, short chapters on style, color, structure and so on. It’s something you can read at night before dozing off to dream about your garden. My copy has yellow highlighting throughout.


One sentence in particular hits home:

“Tentative and spontaneous additions to a garden space can often become its most serious liabilities.”

Many gardeners can relate to that experience. Especially in spring when, after a cold, miserable winter, we long for anything green. And buy it on impulse. This arbor was one of those spontaneous purchases that I later lamented. Made of white plastic resin, it stood out at night like a searchlight. It glowed even without moonlight. During the day, it caught one’s eyes no matter what else was in the garden so I moved it. And painted it. And then plunked two smokebushes on either side.


With a little paint I had transformed what had been a jarring liability into a “doorway” leading to the side yard. This spring I’m going to restrain myself from such purchases. Maybe.

—Nina Koziol

Paths of Desire

This is a wonderful book that would make a great gift for any gardener. Here’s my interview with Dominque Browning that ran in the Chicago Tribune a few years back.

Of paths, passions and ponderings

Dominique Browning follows the road less gardened to discover what really matters in her personal landscape

Into each garden, a little turmoil must fall. Disasters happen. There were turf-digging, grub-searching skunks. Marauding teenagers. Obstinate neighbors. Dying trees. And a collapsing retaining wall that eventually crushed a hefty perennial border. Dominique Browning has experienced them all in her garden in Westchester County, N.Y. , and carefully chronicles each in her new book, "Paths of Desire: Passions of a Suburban Gardener" (Scribner, 256 pages, $24).

She observes these mini-tragedies along with ethereal events -- hordes of fireflies ascending after a thunderstorm. Flickering candles casting shadows as birds settle in for the night. And, in the front yard, a small forest of sassafras with leaves that light up the autumn sky.

But this is not just an account of one woman's gardening joys and woes. It is a journey -- sometimes bittersweet -- that slowly reveals the importance of family and friends, lost love and renewal. "We get so caught up in the right plant, right place, we forget what it means to walk or sit in the garden. What do you discover? What is it about?" Browning asks.

Editor in chief of House & Garden magazine for nearly a decade, Browning is not your typical gardener. She keeps no logs of what's been planted where or what should be moved. She spends more time pondering than planting. She says she's hopeless with plant names and disorganized in the garden.

"Sitting and thinking are as valuable a sort of industriousness as kneeling and digging. No one needs to prove, yet again, that a garden is labor intensive," the 48-year-old Browning says. One of the pleasures of her job, she says, is the opportunity to snoop into other people's lives -- through their gardens, kitchens, dining rooms and living rooms and the objects they reveal.

But not long after Browning joined the magazine, her garden was snooped upon -- by someone curious about what she might bring to the magazine's content. The perpetrator slinked around back and discovered Browning's set of aluminum lawn chairs with plastic webbing (they cost 40 bucks at a yard sale and brought back fond childhood memories). The news was promptly blabbed at a hoity-toity dinner party, where it got back to her that the chairs were pronounced, well, tacky. Old. Cheap. A disgrace.

She shrugs it off with a laugh. "You can never say that one style is in good taste or not. Good taste has more to do with how things are put together. Tasteful is when there's unity. Things don't jar. It's interesting and comfortable," Browning says.

A serene place

Her house and garden, which is just shy of a half-acre, are an anomaly. The house sits on a street lined with neatly cropped lawns and tightly pruned shrubs. It's hard to spot, nestled behind the quarter-acre woodland filled with tall, thin sassafras, a thick understory of rhododendron, white-flowering azaleas and English ivy.

"She's left the front yard very wild. There's a beautiful feeling when the wind whistles through the trees," says Stephen Orr, special projects editor at House & Garden. "The main feeling you get is a sense of enclosure and serenity in a very pretty place."

The garden languished along, with Browning, in post-divorce flux, for several years. When the retaining wall finally crushed a row of frothy-flowered tree hydrangeas, Rose of Sharon bushes and perennials, Browning began the slow process of restoration and discovery -- of herself and the garden.

The New Back Bed, as she calls it, now features lavender, hollyhock, phlox, foxglove, mint ("Oh, the mistakes I made," she writes in the book), sedum and daisies. She crammed, moved, tended, lost, yanked and killed a variety of plants. "You can never know what will work until you try it. And there's a value to wandering around and contemplating" before acting, Browning says.
The side yard, called The Wandering Garden, was transformed as more than two dozen declining hemlocks were replaced with flowering shrubs, more evergreens, hostas, Solomon's seal and other wildflowers and a winding path.

In a far intimate corner, two Chinese bronze dragons with ferocious grins -- snapped up when Browning felt the "magnetic rays" of a local consignment shop calling her -- flank two comfortable wood chairs. Layers of viburnum, laurel and hydrangeas front tall evergreens nearby. "It's not fussy. I tend to be informal inside and out. It's a place to relax and think," Browning says.

Steppingstones and mulched trails meander through the yard. They are Desire Paths, as landscape designers sometimes call them, places that draw you along to someplace special.
Perhaps the best parts, Browning says, are the garden's scents, sounds and textures, deciding what to plant where and watching as the garden matures.

Sit a spell

Places to sit and reflect are abundant indoors (there's a couch in the kitchen where her sons prefer to dine a la coffee table) and outside (she dragged a chair around to different spots where she could leisurely muse over the placement of permanent benches, beds, borders and a little Buddha statue). Plastic jungle gyms, uncontrollable eyesores (courtesy of the aesthetically challenged neighbor and his dead Volkswagen bus), all are the stuff of suburbia, she says.

"It's a book I read with a pen in hand, ready to underline the telling phrases that I wished I had written," says Carolyn Ulrich, editor of Chicagoland Gardening magazine. "There are two types of garden books -- those that tell how to do things and those that tell us why we bother. I prefer the latter, which is why I took such pleasure in her book."

A self-proclaimed procrastinator who enjoys nothing more than considering all the possibilities, Browning finally brought in the Helpful Men -- electricians, masons, carpenters, a landscaper, plumbers. They fixed a badly crumbling asphalt driveway (only after she twisted her ankle on the way back from a fancy fete in gown and heels); the century-old concrete retaining wall (which collapsed as she stood before it one morning garbed in a nightgown with coffee cup in hand); and a variety of other calamities.

Browning's journey has taken some 15 years or so and was first revealed in an earlier book, "Around the House and in the Garden: A Memoir of Heartbreak, Healing and Home Improvement" (Scribner, 208 pages, $12).

About time

Contemplating instead of weeding or pruning has its benefits. Some time ago, Browning decided to compartmentalize her life -- work really hard at her job but make sure her weekends were free for family, writing, reading, playing the piano, puttering with perennials or just sitting and watching.

"I realized that my young son was talking to me one day, and I hadn't heard a thing he said. I was losing time with my kids. When I was at work, I was thinking about the kids. And when I was home, I was thinking about work. I was never where I'd need to be."

“What people can learn from her is not the practical or how-to, but an attitude," Ulrich says. "You learn that gardens take time, at least the ones you create yourself and are truly yours."

SNOOP PATROL: What’s on Dominique Browning's nightstand?

Like Dominique Browning, we, too, enjoy the part of our job that gives us entree (and poking-around rights) to people's homes and lives. We enjoy it so much that we have formed our own Snoop Patrol to peek inside medicine cabinets, in really private spaces or under dinnerware for makers and markings. We unveil our crew's first report with our findings from Browning's Westchester, N.Y., home.

1. One thing on your nightstand: A little teddy bear abandoned by one of my children. (It sits next to a stack of books including "Peter Pan," Marie Antoinette's biography and "Great Expectations.")

2. One thing on a living room wall: A sepia photograph of a pristine white bird by Jack Spencer.

3. Something in your house from your childhood: A couple of stuffed animals lying hopelessly somewhere.

4. Three condiments in your refrigerator: Mustard, mustard and horseradish. I love mustard.

5. Three things in your medicine cabinet: Perfumes -- Joy, Chanel No. 5 and Vacances, which means vacation.

6. Where do the dirty dishes go? I hardly ever use the dishwasher and I'm tidy -- I do the dishes right away.

7. Color of your living room sofa: A pale buttery yellow chintz with lilac and blue flowers.

8. Maker of your everyday dinnerware: Stangl.

9. Maker of your fine china: Royal Worcester collected in college (and much more). I have a china fetish.

10. What is the one "thing" you would opt to save from your house: My piano.

© Chicago Tribune and Nina A. Koziol