Form, Foliage And Function: A Perennial Border For All Seasons

By Shannon Hicks

HARTFORD — Borders are as necessary for gardens as is water, cultivation, and care. Sydney Eddison has been in the working gardens of her home in Newtown for four decades and has learned the importance of planning ahead, including plants that will create definition year-round.

A special guest during the 2004 Connecticut Flower & Garden Show in February, Mrs Eddison offered “A Perennial Border for All Seasons,” a lecture that was attended by so many people some attendees had to stand across the back of the room and even along the side walls of the lecture room in order to hear what Mrs Eddison had to say.

Mrs Eddison, a master gardener and the author of books and countless articles, presented her slide lecture on February 28. Her program opened with a view of a main border and island bed of one of her gardens in spring and concluded, some 80 images later, with winter scenes.

“Structure in all seasons is important,” Mrs Eddison said recently. “You want structure so that you have something to focus on in all seasons. Your garden looks purposeful. Structure defines the garden. You know it’s not just the lawn.”

Americans seem to have discovered perennials only during the last two decades. While perennials will return year after year, the idea that they are “carefree subjects that last forever is seriously flawed,” Mrs Eddison wrote in her wonderful book of 1997, The Self-Taught Gardener: Lessons from a Country Garden. Mrs Eddison’s chapter “What To Grow” offers the tongue-in-cheek definition of a perennial from the fellow noted horticulturist, author and lecturer Frederick McGourty: “A plant that returns year after year — if it lives.”

Mrs Eddison’s recent program had suggestions for plants and their placement for all four seasons. She presented gorgeous slides of her gardens during the seasons. The gardens feature, at different times, countless daylilies, plus dogwood, peonies, lamb’s ears, purple iris, and what she describes as “a main event” for the gardens, rhododendron.

Sydney and John Eddison’ home is in northern Newtown decades. The grounds have become a continued work in progress. The color scheme of the Eddison gardens change dramatically depending on the time of day and season.

“During the year the color schemes vary from parchment, to greens, to calm reds, to summer’s daylilies, with reds, oranges, yellows, and purples all held in place by a wide band of lamb’s ears,” Mrs Eddison said, complementing her words with images offering clear views of these changes in seasons and colors. “There is also the hydrangea, whose crisp leaves never need anything — and you value that — and globe thistles…”

There are six secrets for a good perennial border, according to Mrs Eddison, who has learned these secrets through years of trial and error.

Mrs Eddison has been “tinkering,” she said, for almost 44 years in her gardens. Her lecture concentrated on three of those gardens, including one that was begun around 1965. The six things to remember are geometry, creating bone structure, concerning oneself with foliage first, including some workhorse plants, creating and maintaining precise lines and clean edges, using repetition, and remembering “less is more.”

The outline and line of all beds should be sharp and clean. That’s the geometry lesson.

Bone structure means rigidly clean lines and an addressing of the ends of the garden. “You want to know where the garden ends,” she said.

“Proportions are important,” she also told the afternoon’s attendees. “You learn by looking and attempting.

“My gardens have changed over the years, as will yours,” she told the capacity crowd. “It’s an ongoing process, with some predictable phases.”

In The Self-Taught Gardener Mrs Eddison wrote, “If you can accept the fact that a garden is never finished, you will be way ahead of me when I was starting out. …A garden is in a constant state of flux. From hour to hour, day to day, season to season, and year to year, it is always changing.

“That is the nature of nature; the nature of life; and the nature of both the garden and the gardener. Changes come about by design, by accident, and necessity, and as a result of time passing. Change is the least-talked-about aspect of gardening,” she continued.

During her years of gardening, research work, and writing, Mrs Eddison has identified three phases that all gardeners go through. These are a love affair with flowers and the discovery of perennials (“some of which prove less perennial than we thought,” she said, and received knowing laughs in return), the realization that flowers have leaves that will last an entire season, and then the appreciation of form and foliage.

 “We all fall in love with flowers, and what usually brings us to gardens are borders,” Mrs Eddison said. Instead of succumbing to the allure of petals and leaves, however, Mrs Eddison suggests gardeners think first about form and the underlying shape of each plant.

“Most are either amorphous and cloudlike or fall into one of the following categories: cones, globes, mounds, spikes, fountains, or mats. Use them all and include a few woody plants among the perennials to make your border more interesting visually and to give it that it of bone structure,” she said.

Think in terms of the essential shape of each plant, she urged. Mrs Eddison offered the following descriptions.

Cones are plants, like Alberta spruce, with broad bases and carry weight while rising to a point and offering height. They are solid, strong, and shapely.

Globes have weight, solidity, and “a satisfying completeness,” she said. “Globes are certainly a form you want. It’s a strong, stabilizing, weighty form,” she said.

Mounds are lower in profile than globes and softer in outline. They form a connection with the ground.

Spikes raise the eye and offer contrast to the rounded forms. The also provide lightness, elegance, and precision.

Fountains are the essence of grace and provide height.

Mats secure the garden to the landscape.

All of these shapes give a garden geometry.

Workhorse plants, alluded to earlier, are also essential to any garden that hopes to draw the eye at any time of the year.

These plants, which maintain their looks throughout the season, include Sedum ‘Autumn Joy,’ most daylilies, Coreopsis verticillata, and several grasses including blue oat grass (Helictotrichon sempervirens), Miscanthus sinensis ‘Morning Light,’ and fountain grass (Pennisetum alopecuroides).

“They will work for you, very hard,” said Mrs Eddison. “These are plants that pay their dues. These will hold your garden together.”

Sedum ‘Autumn Joy,’ Mrs Eddison said in Hartford, should be in every garden in Connecticut. With accompanying line illustrations, she outlined good reasons for this in The Self-Taught Gardener:

“By mid-May, the blue-green foliage forms a neat globe. Beautiful even without flowers, the stems and expanding leaves make a substantial contribution to the early summer garden.

“Pink, fuzzy, flower heads, gradually turning rose-red, enliven the perennial border for six weeks of more, beginning in late August.

“When each dry flower head supports a cone of snow, there is nothing handsomer in the winter garden.”

By the time winter’s cold air and harsh precipitation rolls back into the area, most of the plants in Mrs Eddison’s gardens have lost their foliage. Any remaining leaves have faded to parchment colors, and the plants are down to their basic bone structure.

“Winter is the hardest scenario, but your gardens will be saved with a strong line and border.”

Mrs Eddison has come to “respect,” she says, the Albertus spruce. With a planting of that, some sturdy grasses and patches of lamb’s ear on some of the gardens’ corners when winter rolls in, “it doesn’t look blank any more.”

The perennial border of Mrs Eddison’s home was more beautiful in 1997 than any previous year, according to closing notes in The Self-Taught Gardener.

“I finally got the daylilies just where I wanted them in a rippling multi-color ribbon running the length of the bed,” she wrote. “I’ve got good edgers, enough variegated foliage to stand in for flowers between peaks of bloom, the purple smoke bush to hold down one end, and the wonderful threadleaf Japanese maple to hold down the other. The lamb’s ears never looked better.

“Then,” she continued, “came drought, voles, and huge losses.”

Gardeners around the world can nod in sympathy to those losses. A garden is always shifting and changing. A good gardener is willing to shift right along, and continue looking for ways to work with nature year-round.