A wide variety of perennials familiar to gardeners can be found in seaside gardens along our Eastern seaboard. Iris and peonies, phlox and hemerocallis, delphiniums, and chrysanthemums flourish where there is no danger from the salt spray.
However, there are much less familiar, but distinctive, species and varieties especially suited to oceanside gardens because of the texture and color of their foliage. Somehow, those with silver-gray and blue-green foliage are unusually striking when grouped with evergreens and showy-flowered perennials.
With this thought in mind, a selected list has been assembled to help you become better acquainted with these desirable hardy plants.
Anthemis Tinctoria
Because of its free seeding habit, Anthemis tinctoria usually spreads like a weed. Yet, it is an ideal summer cut flower that displays eye-catching, golden, daisy-like blooms on two-foot stems.
The grayish cast on its sturdy stems and finely-toothed leaves adds greatly to the appearance of this sturdy perennial, which is practically disease resistant.
Since realizing their value, hybridizers have given us several hybrids in recent years. Variety Moonlight has pale yellow flowers, often measuring 2″ inches across, and Golden Dawn is valued for its brightness. double yellow daisies.
The Sturdy Artemisias
Few perennials are better suited to seaside gardens than the various artemisias known as wormwood because of their bitter flavor. Silvery of color and lacy of foliage, Artemisia pontica, known as “old woman” and a dozen other provincial names, forms a low, spreading mound about a foot high for border accents where there is room to spare.
Its taller-growing companion, A. abrotanum, referred to as “old man,” is a sub-shrub of woody character, with thread-like foliage of pungent scent, often reaching several feet in height.
A. absinthium, the source of the potent liqueur, is valued primarily for its silky, whitish foliage since the small yellow flowers on three-foot sterns are of little consequence.
Widely grown for its delicate silvery-gray foliage is A. Albula Silver King, sometimes called ghost plant since clumps of this perennial have a ghostlike appearance.
Every beachcomber knows the familiar dusty miller, or beach wormwood, A. stelleriana.
With its wooly, white leaves, this sprawling plant is completely at home in beach sand along our coast from Quebec to Delaware.
A strong point in its favor is that it can be kept fairly trimmed in hot, dry places in the garden. Indoors the flower arrangers are making considerable use of it these days.
Superior Baptisia Australis
Baptisia australis, the false indigo, is a superior perennial for a note of blue in flower and foliage. After its spikes of blue lupine-like flowers fade in July, the durable, glaucous foliage makes a background for annuals and late-flowering perennials.
Here is a perennial of noted architectural form for the middle ground of the hardy border since it averages 3′ feet in height.
Striking Globe Thistle
Bold and striking, the globe thistle, listed in catalogs as Echinops ritro, belongs among shrubs or fits as a background plant for the border.
The deep, metallic-blue flowers are borne on stout sterns 4′ to 5′ feet tall, clothed with coarse, thistle-like foliage. Tap-low Blue is a more refined form, somewhat lower in stature and rich in color.
Picturesque Sea Holly
Equally picturesque but more distinctive in appearance is the sea holly, Eryngium Amethystinum, native to Europe and Asia.
It is easily distinguished by its glossy, rigid foliage, much-spined, and three-foot silvery stems, which hold the metallic-blue, thistle-like flower heads aloft. It flowers during July and August and adapts itself easily to sandy soils.
On land and near the sea, the hemerocallis or day-lily thrives with little care. The advances made by hybridizers in the past 20 years have brought widespread popularity to this denizen of old gardens.
Today varieties in an amazing color range may be had, which will flower from May to September.
Pink, red and bicolor forms supplement the tawny orange species of the roadside and the old lemon yellow form of a century ago.
Because of their firm rooting habit, resistance to drought and disease, and pleasing foliage, they are among the most popular perennials of our time.
44659 by J. D.