Someone recently insisted to me that even the toughest gardens need watering; I beg to differ.
I’m not being flippant, because, being gone for months at a time every summer, with no irrigation or anyone to drag hoses for me, I, too, have lost cherished plants to prolonged drought. But across a lifetime of gardening and working with other gardeners professionally, I have noted some the most durable plants for Southern gardens that look good all year.
Of course, those that do best were planted well to begin with, usually in fall or winter to take advantage of winter rains, and in wide holes covered with thick soil-feeding mulch. This is how it has been done for centuries, and still works.
But when it comes to the actual plants, I have done my homework. For well over half a century I have been documenting the toughest beauties thriving in the most challenging setting: Old “garden park” type graveyards, especially Greenwood Cemetery just a block north of our state Capitol in Jackson, where plants thrive for decades with no water or care other than string trimmer protection.
There you will find oaks, cedars, crape myrtles, magnolias, bald cypress, and ginkgos, as well as a huge variety of shrubs including evergreen arborvitae and ever-burgundy loropetalum, spring-flowering quince, spirea, and forsythia, on through summer-blooming gardenia, abelia, rose of Sharon, a couple dozen different ever-blooming disease-free shrub roses, fall flowering sasanquas, and on to winter camellias and berry-laden hollies and nandina. In the shade you will see English ivy, vinca, liriope and mondo grass, and spreading, evergreen euonymus.
And talk about interesting old-fashioned bulbs! There are all sorts of different daffodils (including fragrant “paperwhites”), purple grape hyacinth, star flower (Ipheion), gaudy magenta gladiolus, red amaryllis, summer-flowering crinums, orange tiger lilies, pink “naked ladies” and fall-blooming red “spider lilies.”
But the sheer number of totally care-free herbaceous perennials I have uncovered in absolute no-maintenance situations as found between tombstones is astounding. Start with iris, whose year-round foliage alone makes it worth growing, and native blue star (Amsonia), add orange daylilies, succulent sedums, perennial blue salvias, Mexican mint marigold (a tarragon substitute always in glorious bloom for the Day of the Dead in Hispanic cemeteries), native purple liatris, and purple coneflower. For shadier areas throw in ferns, monkey grass, hostas, and winter painted arum.
Of course, though all these can be found thriving in ornate “garden park” style cemeteries, not all these are appropriate everywhere, especially the modern “memorial park” style, where mowing is the main type of maintenance.
But they most certainly are easily worked into regular home gardens, with only a small amount of initial soil preparation and enough water to get them started.
The point of this is that there really are plants that will grow with little or no care. Combining a handful of these into one small flower bed, and adding a “hard” feature such as a big rock, birdbath, interesting driftwood, large urn, or even a discreet all-green bottle tree can make it all the more appealing through all the seasons.
And all this is without even planting even a single seasonal annual, from the dozens of easy low-care summer flowers like celosia, zinnia, Angelonia, moss rose, periwinkle, basils, and a few stalks of burgundy okra just for looks, to my mainstay winter beauties which always include a couple of small beds and large, well-placed pots of pansies and smaller but more floriferous violas, colorful kales and Swiss chard, snapdragons, and emerald green parsley.
Email me from my blog for my list of beautiful plants even dead people can grow.
Felder Rushing is a Mississippi
author, columnist, and host of the “Gestalt Gardener” on MPB Think Radio. Email gardening questions to rushingfelder@yahoo.com.
