(calm music) - Our son and his girlfriend bought their first house last Friday.

Like all parents, Tom and I were excited to see their new home and yard when we went to help them move this past weekend.

Both the house and the yard are lovely, but the yard will need some work, as the previous owners were definitely not gardeners.

I'm Mary Holm, host of Prairie Yard and Garden, and today I'm going to visit a perennial expert to give me plant ideas and tips so we can help with our son's yard.

Come along and join me.

- [Announcer] Funding for Prairie Yard and Garden is provided by Heartland Motor Company, providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years.

In the heart of truck country, Heartland Motor Company, we have your best interest at heart.

Farmer's Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative, proud to be powering Acira, pioneers in bringing state-of-the-art technology to our rural communities.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen, in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

And by Friends of Prairie Yard and Garden, a community of supporters like you who engage in the long-term growth of the series.

To become a Friend of Prairie Yard and Garden, visit pioneer.org/pyg.

(calm music) - The Holms have a new yard in the family and that yard does need some work.

There are lots of perennial beds that have been neglected and will need rejuvenation.

Lucky for us, we know the man who literally wrote the book on perennials.

Mike Hegar wrote "Growing Perennials in Cold Climates" and is a wealth of knowledge when it comes to perennial plants.

And he said we could come to visit and get lots of advice to improve our yards and flower gardens.

Welcome, Mike.

- Thank you, Mary.

Pleasure to be with you again.

- Mike, how long have you been gardening?

- Well, I've been gardening since I was a little kid.

I was raised on a farm and my parents had a two acre fruit and vegetable garden, so I've been gardening pretty much my whole life.

Professionally, 40 plus years I've been doing it.

I started with perennials, really did.

My first job was working for the Minnesota Arboretum.

So that job was almost exclusively perennials and annuals.

So I kinda got honed from there, learned from there, and I've just kind of been interested and been growing them ever since.

- For some of our viewers, what is the difference between an annual and a perennial?

- Of course, an annual only lives one season.

It will set seed and die.

Even if the frost doesn't, you know, take it out, it will still die.

Some of the plants that we treat as annuals are actually perennials in warmer climates, but they're not winter hardy here so we treat them as annuals.

A true perennial is any plant that lives three years or longer.

Beauty, of course, with growing perennials is that you don't have to replant every year.

The trade-off that you make the other way is that most of them have shorter bloom periods, don't bloom as long as an annual does.

So it makes designing and putting the garden together a little bit more challenging so that the combinations change from one season to the next or within two week periods sometimes even.

So where with annuals, you can plant in spring and it's going to flower until frost takes it out at the end of the year and it's going to be great the whole season.

There are so many that we can grow here, even this far north, thousands and thousands of varieties of perennials that we can grow.

- What are some of the things we need to take into consideration when we're planning out our beds?

- Well, I think the first starting point is to do a site assessment of the area where you want to grow those plants.

Light conditions, soil conditions, some of those kinds of things.

'Cause for long-term success, you have to put the right plant in the right location.

So, and of course for us, gardening this far north, winter hardiness is always an issue and that has to play in as well because we can come up with lots of stuff that would be great but it may not be permanent and long lived for us.

So, but I think you start with that site assessment of what you have in that situation.

Then you pick the plants based upon the answers to those questions.

- We're standing here in an area that's getting a lot of sun and seems to be quite warm.

Would you be willing to show us some of the plants that you've picked out for this area?

- I'd be more than happy to.

Well, this bed here is really, the intention was really to be more of a rock garden kind of collection.

So consequently it holds a lot of dwarf, small plants that probably would really make, many of them make nice edging plants, you know, in the average garden as well.

You know, there's a number of sedums up here.

There's a blue foliage one up there.

There's variegated one here.

They make really very nice front edge plants.

Other plants that would be really good for the front of the gardens, some of the dwarf cranesbills, the hardy geraniums are dwarf cranesbills.

There's one growing right there that's obviously done flowering already for this year.

There's a couple others scattered here through the garden as well.

Blooming here right in the garden right now are three different ornamental onions that are blooming right now.

And they make phenomenal border plants blooming in the summer months.

Great foliage, long bloom periods.

Pollinators absolutely love them.

The bees, and you can see them on there now, the bees are all over them right now.

So they are such underutilized plants for us here that we need to use them more and more as well.

- [Mary] Do you have to worry about onion maggots with any of these?

- [Mike] I've been growing them for decades, I've never seen it.

I can't honestly say that that doesn't happen, but I have never experienced it.

The other one that's kind of interesting blooming up there at the top of the blue flowers is one of a number of hardy gentins for us that could do really quite nicely.

Now they do like really well drained soils.

Consequently, I have it up on the slope where it drains off quite nicely but gentins are such wonderful flowers and there's lots of them that we can grow here that people aren't aware of.

- What is this white flowering plant, right here?

- That little white one is actually a yarrow.

And of course most border type yarrows are quite tall, bigger heads of flowers.

This is an alpines species that never gets any bigger than it is now.

Now it's actually on its second bloom here right now.

So its first bloom was earlier on, but we deadheaded it and now it's throwing another flush of flowers as well.

So there's a number of those that we can grow.

There's a few campanulas or bellflowers that are still throwing a few flowers in the garden.

They make great front edge kinds of plants as well.

Up the hill there a little farther, blooming right now, is the balloon flower.

About a week ago, that was solid blue, totally covered with flowers, but it's kind of coming to the end.

A little bit taller plant but still would be kind of a nice front edge kind of plant to have in a garden as well.

- [Mary] Do most of them bloom in the spring?

- Yeah, you know, the intention here with this little garden space was for it to be kind of a rock garden, alpine kind of environment.

And most of the plants that typically would be growing in that kind of situation have evolved in high altitude areas with very short seasons, snowfalls that melt and go away very late, and they've evolved to come on and flower very quickly after snow recedes, flower, set seed, and then they're done because the season is so short that the frost comes really early too.

So consequently, a lot of the plants that you see in the garden here are not blooming right now, but if you had been here in May, this was alive with color.

And that's just the way, the nature of how most of those plants have evolved, the situations they've evolved in, in nature.

- But a lot of these, the sedums and everything, have really nice variegated or colored foliage too.

- Yeah, yeah, this little gem right down in front of us here is actually a little dwarf variegated form of burnet.

Meaning burnet as in herb salad, burnet is a common herb.

This is another species of that and has that great variegated foliage all through the season.

So though it's in flower right now and it's got an interesting floral structure, even before it blooms and after it's done and we've deadheaded it, it still is a plant that has interest through the whole season because of its foliar characteristics.

And that's an important part of what we have to be thinking about with perennials as well.

It's not just about flowers, it's equally as about foliage and foliage textures and color combinations and some of those kinds of things.

That's how you extend the window of interest beyond just bloom season is thinking both flowers and foliage.

- Well, let's go visit an area that maybe gets a little more shade.

- Sounds good!

This is of course a shade bed.

And I'm a lover of hostas, as you can see, but I'm not interested in just collecting hostas alone.

So I'm trying to be a collector and also have somewhat of a design feel to the garden as well.

Consequently, you'll see a lot of other midsize kinds of plants along with the hostas that really break up the garden a little bit.

And there's some thought been given to things that are going to bloom at the same time, that are not hostas that will be blooming at the same time.

So there's always going to be some level of interest in this garden as we go through the summer.

It's a relatively young garden but I think it does do kind of a little bit of a showcase of what you can do in the shade with foliage textures and foliage colors, and really that's what shade gardening is all about.

Really what carries this and makes it flow through the whole season is that different combination of foliage colors and foliage textures.

- So how do you actually go about dividing some of these plants?

- A lot of people are very intimidated by dividing plants and very scared about it.

If you're careful about it, it's really a very simple, pretty easy process.

You know, you can take a sharp spade.

I use a sharp knife a lot to cut things into pieces, always making sure that there's a good, healthy crown that's there and also that there's a decent amount of good roots there that can immediately begin to support that plant and so it can grow new foliage.

So it's really not as traumatic, I think, as a lot of people think.

Where people run into problems a lot of times with failure with dividing perennials is that they don't pay enough attention to them after the fact.

They divide them, they plant them, they water them, and then they walk away from them.

They have been watched for water the first few weeks of their life as they re-establish.

The standard rule of thumb, of course, is an inch of water a week.

And the real answer to that question is to stick your finger in the ground and check the moisture.

That's the beauty of that.

Now we've introduced a lot of organic into this soil.

It's got well-rounded horse manure and it's got peat moss, probably four to six inches of each that have been worked into this bed.

That greatly reduces the amount of water needs because both of those have great water-holding capacity within them.

So it's kind of an intuitive thing, I think, that you learn as a gardener and you actually learn to read your plants.

You know that, you know.

You can look at your garden, you can say, "Yeah, it looks like it's time to water," just by the behavior, by something might be drooping.

That's an indicator plant to you that has a higher water need.

The little yellow plant blooming right there is actually one of the ligularias, which are Asiatic Woodland perennials and they are very high water need plants.

So when I look at this garden and I see that that little yellow ligularia is starting to flag, the sprinklers will go on.

- [Mary] When you say flag, what does that mean?

- [Mike] Wilt.

- [Mary] Okay, drooping.

- [Mike] Yeah, drooping a little bit.

- Okay.

You have some absolutely stunning hostas here.

What are those two?

- The big one in the back is one called Guardian Angel, and Guardian Angels is a sport out of a well known blue one called Blue Angel.

Great big plant.

I saw a Blue Angel one time in a garden in Eastern United States and one plant, 12 feet across.

And so that plant will, if you let it, will take up some serious space.

I will probably never let it get that big.

When it outgrows that space, I will divide it, probably take half of it away, give half of it away or whatever.

So, but yeah, so that's just a sport out of Blue Angel that shows in spring white variegation, totally white.

What you see as kind of a real light green there now, that's what it does in summer.

It mutes down to that kind of coloration.

Down the line there with the yellow one, that is another sport of Blue Angel.

That one's called Earth Angel.

And Earth Angel happens to have the yellow edge to it and that will hold that yellow edge through the whole season.

So hostas are notoriously unstable, constantly sporting, and that's how many of our originations such as Guardian Angel came about was someone had a plant of Guardian Angels and it threw that sport off that had that leaf pattern.

That was divided out, set aside, grown on to make sure it was stable, and ultimately it was introduced to the trade.

Both of those kind of came about that way.

- [Mary] They are absolutely beautiful.

And I love the pattern on this one.

- [Mike] That's one called Gypsy Rose that again earlier in the season had a very bright white centered leaf to it.

Now it's muted down to more creamy coloration and how the light patterns play off of those colors are pretty cool.

It'll hold that color now for the rest of the season.

It's a great, great mid-size hosta, one of the really good grower, overall good performer with great, great pattern to it as well.

- [Mary] I really like how you use combinations here.

That is beautiful.

So what is this?

Because it picks up kind of that same variegated texture.

- It's actually a plant called heucherella and this particular one is called Fresh Green.

Heucherellas can be very simple, as you can see here, green with a little bit of silver patterning to them.

There are all kinds of interesting other foliage colors that are among them as well, similar to what you see in these young coral bells here.

This is one called Forever Red and both those heucherellas and the heucheras really make great, great front edge kind of plants for the shade garden.

They actually like that light shade.

They really kind of add another color element to the garden and you can, again, do what I've kind of done here, play with the gold of the hosta behind it with a red foliage of the heuchera in front of it.

But also adjacent to that is three plants of a lungwort, one called Victorian Brooch that, again, I talk about foliage, there you go.

It's all about foliage.

It's a chartreuse-y yellow of that hosta, it's the red of the coral bell, and the highly silvered part of that lungwort there.

And so even if you look at that at any point in the season and you'll come back even in September and October, this is still nice to look at.

Not a flower happening there.

The lungwort of course would bloom early spring, the hosta is already done.

We've deadheaded it, the hosta flowers are already gone.

The coral bell, if it blooms, would bloom in the early part of summer, but it's really not what you'd grow it for.

We're going to really grow it more for that full year effect than anything.

So again, it's that whole thing of taking little segments of the garden at a time and trying to build those kind of little vignettes to kind of carry the interest through the season.

But then if you look at it overall, you see how the colors of whole hostas play off each other.

As you look down the line there, the two large ones in the back, this being Earth Angel, the one down the line being one called Sagae.

Both with a similar pattern, but a different kind of leaf shape to them, but it helps to carry your, I mean, if you look from Gypsy Rose down the line to Earth Angel, down the line to Sagae, pulls your eye through the garden.

So you can use foliages to do that just like you can use flowers to do that as well.

So try to get a little bit of a sense of massing of some of these things.

Although I'll be honest, I'm a collector.

I love growing all different kinds of plants, so you won't often see a whole bed of one kind of thing here, because I want to showcase so many different kinds of plants.

But I do try to use more than just one of everything in many cases.

- [Mary] So these are a lot of the medium height plants.

Can we see some of the tall ones too?

- In terms of this particular bed here with shade plants, the one in the background there is one of the tall meadow rue.

That's called Lavender Mist meadow rue.

That will be six to eight feet in height.

And those are young plants again, so they were moved recently so they're not particularly good specimens.

Down front here is a little white meadow rue that's just coming into flower.

It's a young plant but ultimately that will probably stand somewhere between four to six feet in height.

It's a little bit more challenging in shade situations to get a lot of verticality than it is in sun.

There's a lot more plants for sun, tall plants for sun, than there are for shade.

In the background here, you'll see in a number of spots back over there.

There's some flower buds just starting to emerge from a number of plants in the background.

That's a Korean species of angelica.

Angelica gigas that will easily stand this high and has big domed heads of reddish purple flowers.

The pollinators are absolutely all over it.

That will come on in the next few weeks as well.

So there are certainly some things for shade, tall Sun King, Aralia, that's very common in the trade.

It's a great plant.

It can get to be four to six feet in height, makes a great background plant for playing some of these combinations against.

And as this garden evolves and the new portions of this are done, we will be integrating some more of those kinds of height things in here as well.

I also use woody plants to help me with that in the shade as well.

Just planted down the line there, that you wouldn't even pick it out as a shrub, but one of the arrowwoods that will ultimately be probably four to six feet in height.

So I'll use some of the woody plants in combination with herbaceous stuff to help me give me more some of that structure and some of that framework that I think you want to have in the garden through the year round.

So there's no reason in the world not to combine woody plants and herbaceous plants, whether it's in the shade or the sun.

They work beautifully together to give a certain sense of privacy to an area.

Actually, the reason why I shoved that arrowwood down the line in the bed there is to close off, if you look down the line, you look right off the property to the gravel road.

Visually, I'm trying to shut that off a little bit to kind of keep your eye contained into this space a little bit more.

- How in the world do you keep up with the weeding here?

- (laughs) Well, I'm one of those weird people that actually loves to weed.

(laughs) We use no herbicides, it's all hand work.

Ultimately as time goes on, as said, this bed was just planted.

We probably will mulch, we'll mulch with an organic mulch on some of these beds to kind of, to do that.

But of course, the beauty of gardening in the shade many times is that you don't have the same weed problems that you have in full sun situation.

So you're not going to be struggling with purslane and knotweed and some of those things like you would in full sun.

Not to say there aren't persistent weed problems.

There can be persistent weed problems in the shade.

Certainly chickweed and some of those kinds of things are ones that come to mind, but yeah, yeah, this looks fresh and clean and neat because I just planted it and the weeds haven't emerged yet.

But we pretty much do it by hand weeding and mulches, yeah.

- What about critters?

- Well, we have our fair share of 'em.

Park land across the road from us, we have a big deer population over in the park across, they come over.

Rabbits and deer are our two biggest problems here.

So we've had pretty good luck just scattering Milorganite around the garden as a deer deterrent and that really works pretty well.

They were back in here the other night, so, but we kind of depend on that.

And we use some repellents for rabbits.

Plantskydd is one that we've had really good luck with Plantskydd.

So we're willing to accept a certain amount of damage.

And I think, you know, with a high-level deer populations around us here, we're never going to totally eliminate it, but, and we may at some point, if it gets really bad, we may have to go into a regular preventative spray program for deer but we have not had to do that yet.

- [Mary] How in the world do you not have slugs?

- Well, you know, this garden has had slugs in years past.

We have not had a problem in recent years with that.

I think if we start using mulches copiously, we may run into a problem with that.

We have used some deterrents and baits in the past to kind of minimize that, then things like Sluggo and some of those kinds of things, we've had really good luck with.

And if we get into a problem, we certainly will do that.

I think the biggest problem you always have to remember with slug control is that most people don't start slug control until the problem has become very apparent.

And slugs actually over winter as eggs and those eggs hatch really early in spring.

So if you're going to start up slug control program, you probably should start it in May, before you would ever see any of the feeding, any of the holes in your leaves would not be present at that point.

If you get them as they hatch from the eggs, you probably will greatly reduce your need for ongoing control through the summer.

So if you're going to start slugs, start early in the season.

Don't wait till midsummer when they've got big holes in your hosta leaves already.

- That's a great tip.

One last question for you.

How many perennials do you have?

- (laughs) Well, I know...

Some of that stuff up in the old parts of the beds that are hostas that I've lost names of and I don't even count those.

So the ones that I know the IDs and everything on, we're over 1,000 varieties in the garden right now and that continues to expand every year.

So I'm sure at some point in time, if I live long enough, I'll have several thousand in the garden here.

So yeah, yeah.

I love growing perennials.

They're just so much fun, so rewarding, and offers so many design possibilities in terms of how you can use them in the landscape, where you can use them.

And there's so many, as I said earlier, there's so many that we can grow here that the palette certainly could be expanded greatly for a lot of folks.

(calm music) - I have a question.

I just put a water feature in my yard.

What plants can I use to add color?

- Well, water lilies are a great thing to grow in aquatic gardens of backyard ponds for some color.

A lot of the water lilies that are available for people to grow come in very many different colors, yellows, pinks, reds.

Some of them have leaves with brown or purple splotches on them.

A lot more variety than what you see in a typical water lily growing in a lake somewhere around here.

And the ones that we grow here are temperate water lilies, meaning they're from cooler Northern climates so they don't need special treatment over the winter to be stored in some heated basement aquarium or something.

They could just stay out in your backyard pond in the mud over winter and then they'll come back the following year.

And so they're really nice additions to a backyard aquatic garden.

- [Announcer] Ask the Arboretum Experts has been brought to you by the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum in Chaska, dedicated to enriching lives through the appreciation and knowledge of plants.

- So we talked a little bit about height for shade and the fact that it can be a little bit challenging obviously.

And I said earlier that the sun situation is easy to find lots of tall perennials for sun situation.

And some things that would come immediately to mind, probably to the top of my list especially for this time of year would be a number of the tall ornamental grasses.

And grasses combine so beautifully with other perennials, with woody plants, and in a variety of different settings.

So grasses would be on that list.

Other things that come to my mind very quickly would be orienpet lilies, the very tall lilies that are crosses between Orientals and trumpets, that these can stand six to eight feet high.

Stalks that are stiff as could be, they don't need to be staked.

They're great for height.

Our native ironweeds that bloom later in the season that are absolutely great pollinator magnets for us.

Some of the tall sunflowers, there's a perennial sunflower called Lemon Queen that's just coming into flower now that will flower from now all the way until probably into November with great little yellow sunflowers on it, great height.

There's so many other things, Joe Pye weeds.

If you're looking for height for sunny situations, there's a great, great number of plants that you can find to utilize for that.

- [Mary] And I bet you, you can even take and put a lot of things in front of them too.

- [Mike] You certainly could.

You can take those medium-sized plants, some of the things we've talked about, obviously here we've talked about for shade.

We've got that same kind of palette of stuff for the sun.

So that could be things like ornamental oreganos, it could be catmints, it could be calamints.

Some of those things that are great mid-sized plants that really bloom all summer long.

They give you great length of bloom that would combine beautifully with some of those taller plants we've already talked about.

And so they're great for filling a number of things in the landscape besides just being beautiful.

There's some very beneficial uses to them in terms of our pollinator plant communities and some of those kinds of things as well.

And, you know, of course when we talk about pollinators, a lot of times we tend to gravitate towards native plants and that makes a whole lot of sense to do that.

But there are also some plants from other parts of the world that are effective food sources for our pollinators as well.

So it isn't only natives.

It can be the combination of the two and the two can work beautifully together.

- What do you do with all these plants to prepare them for winter?

- I don't really do much of anything.

They're pretty much on their own.

I mean, I've selected for hardiness, so, you know, given that fact, they should winter over well.

We do get the benefit of oak leaves falling off our trees into the shade garden here, so that provides us some cover.

But I would only say that anything planted after midsummer probably would be a good idea to put a mulch down for the winter.

So this new bed that we've looked at here, I may make sure that the oak leaves do cover that well, but everything's on its own pretty much and I have had really good luck with that.

As long as we've selected plants appropriately, I don't think there's a whole lot you have to do.

- Mike, thank you so much for sharing your beautiful yard and your beautiful perennials with us.

- It's a pleasure.

I always enjoy talking plants, and it was great to have you here.

- [Announcer] Funding for Prairie Yard and Garden is provided by Heartland Motor Company, providing service to Minnesota and the Dakotas for over 30 years.

In the heart of truck country, Heartland Motor Company, we have your best interest at heart.

Farmer's Mutual Telephone Company and Federated Telephone Cooperative, proud to be powering Acira, pioneers in bringing state-of-the-art technology to our rural communities.

Mark and Margaret Yackel-Juleen, in honor of Shalom Hill Farm, a nonprofit rural education retreat center in a beautiful prairie setting near Windom, Minnesota.

The Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund, with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4, 2008.

And by Friends of Prairie Yard and Garden, a community of supporters like you, who engage in the long-term growth of the series.

To become a Friend of Prairie Yard and Garden, visit pioneer.org/pyg.

(calm music)