Read an Excerpt

Introduction
Any experienced gardener knows that perennials—herbaceous (more or less non-woody) plants that go dormant in the fall and then return in the spring—are the main fabric of an ornamental garden. Trees and shrubs provide architecture, annuals may embroider the design, but it’s the perennials that supply the enduring keynotes of texture, the calculated sequences and rhythms of colors and forms. Perennials dominate through persistence. If you’ve chosen your plants well, once you lay down a theme in perennials, it returns year after year, becoming the framework around which you arrange other plants and furnishings.
           
This is why selecting your perennials wisely is such an important process—the decisions you make can and should have long-lasting repercussions. The process of selection is challenging. Indeed, because of our good fortune, it’s more challenging, or at least more complicated, than ever before. In the last 30 years the American gardener has moved from a situation of perennial famine to one of feast. A generation ago we had access to only a relative handful of old standbys. Since then, however, enterprising breeders, growers, nurseries, and plant hunters have introduced tens of thousands of new species and cultivars to the North American market. What’s more, thanks to the Internet, virtually all these introductions are available for a click and some cash, no matter where you live.
 
There are obvious advantages to this opening of the horticultural floodgates. Plant collectors can satisfy their lust for novelty without ever leaving their own homes, and designers seeking just the right shade of iris or delphinium to perfect a color scheme can find it almost instantly and have it delivered to their mailbox within days. Yet this multiplicity of choices brings its own challenges: confronting a menu so extensive can be daunting. Hostas, for example, are a mainstay of the shade garden: who could imagine such a display without them? There are at least 3000 distinct cultivars of hosta registered with the American Hosta Society and an equal number of unregistered cultivars are in circulation. Which one is best for your situation and tastes? How do you choose? And the multiplicity of hostas actually seems manageable when compared to the selection of daylilies. There are some 60,000 or so daylily selections in cultivation now, with 2000 or more being added every year.
           
The glut of new material, each element of which is advertised in glowing terms, creates a dilemma. No gardener wants to miss out on the best of the new introductions, the plants that combine exceptional beauty with hardiness, easy care, and reliability. But at the same time, no one wants to cope with what amounts to horticultural spam.
           
A new kind of guide is needed to confront this wealth of plants, and that’s just what you’ll find here: a focus on 348 genera that in our opinion furnish a core group of the most reliable and rewarding herbaceous perennials—a toolbox of the truly essential perennials that are outstanding not only for the foliage, flowers, and forms they contribute to the garden, but which are also reliable and robust performers in the landscape. Many of the plants included are commonly seen in garden centers and catalogs, but in an effort to collect the very best, most useful, and most interesting perennials, this book also describes lesser-known species and cultivars. All are commercially available locally or by mail order.
           
Not all the plants included in this guide are equally exceptional in all categories, of course. A culturally demanding plant may be indispensable because of its unique look, its fragrance, or the glorious hue of its blossoms. Similarly, a less aesthetically extraordinary plant may earn its place here because of its exceptional ability to cope with difficult conditions such as drought, summer humidity, or extreme winter cold. Some plants are essential because of their excellence as supporting actors: they may not be brilliant themselves, but they offer the benefit of reinforcing and heightening the effect of those around them.