Which flowers bloom when?
The season's earliest-blooming perennial flowers kick into color this month.
The main benefit of perennials is that they live for years. You don't have to replant them every year as with petunias, marigolds, zinnias, and other annual flowers.
The down side is that most perennials bloom for only a few weeks out of the whole season.
To have a parade of color all season from perennials, the solution is to plant a variety of species that bloom at different times. With good planning, you'll have a garden in which a new perennial starts blooming just as an earlier one is fading.
Below is a guide to peak-bloom times in central Pennsylvania to help you plan. Now is a good time to plant them all.
March: Lenten rose.
April: Barrenwort, bergenia, bleeding heart, bloodroot, brunnera, columbine, creeping phlox, euphorbia, foamflower, lamium, primrose, pulmonaria, rock cress, Virginia bluebell.
May: Amsonia, bachelor button, baptisia, candytuft, catmint, creeping veronica, dianthus, foamybell, forget-me-knot, fringe-leaf bleeding heart, geum, goats beard, hardy geranium, Jacob's ladder, lamium, lily of the valley, meadow rue, iris, peony, poppy, salvia, snow-in-summer, sweet woodruff, Solomon's seal, thrift, trillium.
June: Astilbe, bellflower, catmint, coralbells, coreopsis, daylily, delphinium, evening primrose, filipendula, foxglove, gaillardia, gaura, hardy geranium, hosta, knautia, lady's mantle, lamium, lavender, lupine, penstemon, red hot poker, rodgersia, rose mallow, scabiosa, shasta daisy, spiderwort, tiger lily, verbascum, veronica, yarrow, yucca.
July: Agastache, Asiatic and Oriental lilies, baby's breath, balloon flower, beebalm, black-eyed susan, blackberry lily, butterfly weed, cimicifuga, coreopsis, crocosmia, garden phlox, heliopsis, hollyhock, hosta, Jupiter's beard, liatris, obedient plant, purple coneflower, Russian sage, sea holly, stokesia, veronicastrum.
August: Aster, cardinal flower, goldenrod, Japanese anemone, Joe Pye weed, leadwort, ligularia, liriope, monkshood, perennial sunflower, purple coneflower, reblooming daylily, Russian sage, sedum, sneezeweed, turtlehead.
September: Aster, boltonia, catmint, gaillardia, goldenrod, Japanese anemone, mum, salvia, sedum, toad lily, turtlehead.
October: Aster, goldenrod, mum, Nippon and Montauk daisy.
You might need to work compost into your soil before planting perennials if it's clayish like this.
Perennial planting
It's best to plant new perennials on a cloudy day, in the evening, or when rain is in the forecast. Those conditions reduce the shock of transplanting.
Give store-bought perennials a few days outside in their pots before planting to make sure they're acclimated. Most perennials are grown in greenhouses, and when you buy early in the season, the plants may not have been displayed for very long outside at the garden center yet.
If your soil is clayish or compacted, improve it before planting by working an inch or two of compost, rotted leaves, mushroom soil, or similar organic matter into the loosened top 10 or 12 inches of existing soil.
Most perennials can be planted 18 to 24 inches apart. The biggest ones, such as large hostas, hardy hibiscus, and ornamental grasses, can go three to four feet apart.
Always soak the soil around perennials immediately after planting to make sure the soil is settled around the roots and the ground is damp.
One to two inches of mulch is plenty, preferably pulled back from touching the plant stems.
Yellow or brown needles aren't a problem on evergreens so long as the discoloration is limited to the inside part of the branches, not out to the tips.
Brown needles on the evergreens?
Don't be too alarmed if you see a lot of yellow or brown needles on your evergreens. So long as those colors are limited to the inside of the branches, it's just natural needle drop.
Needles toward the inside of the branches are older ones that drop gradually as the branches grow and produce new green needles toward the ends.
Unlike deciduous trees like maple, dogwood, and cherry, evergreens don't shed all of their leaves every fall. However, they do discard older needles. Some species drop a lot of year-old needles (white pine is the most pronounced), while some hold needles three or four years before dropping them.
Inner needle drop can be heavier in some years than others, usually due to environmental stress, particularly heat and drought.
Last year's ridiculously rainy and disease-plagued season followed by a sudden early-fall snowstorm (Winter Storm Avery) combined to cause noticeably more leaf drop on evergreens such as Hinoki cypress, cryptomeria, and pines.
No need to do anything if those and other evergreens look to be unusually yellow or brown. If the tips are still green, that's good.
The discolored needles eventually will drop, and this spring's new growth will fill in and make the plants denser.
If the discoloration bugs you, run your fingers up and down the branches to dislodge them.
It's a different story if the branches have yellow or brown needles all the way to the end of the branches. That's usually a sign of root failure, most likely from roots rotting in last season's wet soil.
Give those plants a chance to see if new needles grow. If there's enough life in the branches, the plant could recover. If not, prune off dead branches or replace the plant later this spring or summer if it's mostly or completely dead.
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