Perennials in Your Garden

Pleasance Crawford is a Canadian landscape and garden-history researcher
and writer and the co-author of Garden Voices: Two Centuries of Canadian
Garden Writing.

Trevor Cole is Curator of the Dominion Arboretum, Central Experimental Farm, author of Woody Plant Source List (Ottawa: Agriculture Canada, 1982), and an experienced plantsman. This booklet replaces Descriptive Notes on Herbaceous Perennials for Canadian Gardens, and 970, Growing Herbaceous Perennials, both by R.W. Oliver. All plant measurements are now metric, and the booklet under review is available also in French.

The booklet follows a format that has become standard for works of this kind: an introduction, which defines perennials to mean herbaceous perennials, including “bulbs, tubers, and rhizomes, as well as plants that do not die down to the ground each year” and which outlines their uses; a brief section on planning perennial gardens: discussions of location, site preparation, design, hardiness, plus two perennial bed designs; a section on culture (which includes planting, care, fertilizing, watering, staking, transplanting, propagation, fall maintenance, winter protection, spring renovation, and pests and diseases); and 40 pages of “the more common and fairly available Recommended Plants, listed alphabetically by genus, with common name, period of bloom, height, brief description, and names of commonly available cultivars. The author’s interest in and knowledge of nursery sources for ornamental plants is reflected in informative comments throughout this section.

Next, a helpful seven-page “Using Plants” matrix groups these recommended plants under use headings: shade, moist soils, wet areas, dry soils, spring flowers, summer flowers, fall flowers, cut flowers, dried flowers, fragrant flowers, and fragrant foliage. A “Key to Scientific Names” gives every reader access to the alphabetical-by-genus “Recommended Plants” section.

The booklet is illustrated with 21 figures, 11 of them in colour. Particularly informative are those that compare and contrast similar flowers.

A booklet of this sort can only summarize for experienced gardeners, or introduce perennials to new gardeners and help them find further information when they are ready. The author recommends the excellent Canadian Garden Perennial byA.R. Buckley, who was at the Central Experimental Farm for many years, for a more extensive discussion; and he provides a section on “Plant Societies,” which lists 14 groups, 6 based in Canada, specializing in particular groups of perennials. Unfortunately, readers might not notice the Buckley reference, which comes at the beginning of the “Recommended Plants” section. A more comprehensive list of further references, in a separate section, would make the booklet even more useful.