Ten Best Perennial Plants for Yearlong Flowers

Enjoying the beauty and fragrance of flowers is delightful all year long. But having flowers continually blooming in your garden can be tricky. Here's the key: a perennial garden. Unlike annuals, the best perennial plants only require planting one time and then provide years of beautiful blossoms.

Creating your own wonderful perennial garden is simply a matter of discovering your favorite perennial flowers and planting them. Of course, you'd probably enjoy a hassle-free garden as well. Meeting all these needs, the easy-care plants on this list of favorite perennials thrive with only sunshine, water and deadheading (i.e. removing the dead blooms). Just plant them in the spring and savor beautiful flowers all year.

Listed in the order in which they bloom is a totally subjective list of the best perennial plants for yearlong blooms in your perennial garden:

Fresh white blossoms of candytuft, arriving in late winter or early spring, lead the way. With a bloom season of approximately two months, this plant flourishes on evergreen mounds and makes a wonderful ground cover.

Next, the small pink, lavender or white blossoms of garden phlox make their entrance in mid-spring and form an additional lovely groundcover, blooming for several weeks and providing a beautiful backdrop for other plants.

Joining these groundcovers is the Autumn Joy stonecrop. A type of sedum, small green clusters appear in early spring followed by thick shiny leaves on stalks in late spring. Rose-colored flowers further enhance this plant in late summer.

Peonies and Gerbera daisies take center stage next. The full, often ruffled-edge peony, is a showstopper in any perennial garden, swaying gracefully in the breeze, while cheerful gerbera daisies add splashes of bright color wherever you plant them.

Perennial hibiscus enters next. With lovely saucer-shaped blooms in shades of pink, this gracious plant closes each evening and starts anew each morning. And knockout roses in pink or red are fast becoming the favorite perennials, with their endless blooms from early summer until frost.

Star Gazer lilies, blooming in early summer, make a spectacular show with their gorgeous deep pink color and as they exit, multihued day lilies along with butterfly bushes in purple, lavender or white begin their non-stop show and continue producing exuberant blooms until frost.

Together with evergreen shrubs, the best perennial plants make a beautiful, low-maintenance garden. Adding in a few pretty annuals, you'll have a spectacular garden that garners compliments year around.

Sources:

http://extension.missouri.edu/publications/DisplayPub.aspx?P=G6650

http://www.perennials.com/index.html