WCAX.COM Local Vermont News, Weather and Sports-Planning your garden-perennials

At the Montreal Botanical Garden, they have all kinds of great examples of perennial flowers and how to use perennials in your landscape. And one of the best ways to combine perennials is by looking at plant and leaf textures. We tend to look at colors, we know what our favorite colors are, and what we want the flowers to look like, but especially with perennials, the flowers don't always last all that long. It's nice to have perennials that have different textures next to or on top of each other.

It's absolutely beautiful around here, not only the textures, and the colors, but just the way that they combine everything. You can have plants like artemesia, with soft feathery leaves combined with some alliums so they're sticking up right through the middle of the artemesia. It's kind of stunning!

Or you can use plants, such as gauras or yarrows, with nice and spiky foliage and then have softer plants, like the lambs ears down below them so you get this contrast that really grabs your eye. It forces you to really take a closer look. With all of the different types of alliums available, such as the drumstick alliums, they look really beautiful next to the stone crops or the sedums. You have different flower colors and textures on the foliage and they can really blend nicely as you can match the colors and the textures together.

You can even use edibles in the same way. You can have a sweet potato vine, which is mostly used as an ornamental, but have parsley planted around it, so it's like, "Hey, I could eat the parsley." It's a beautiful study in contrasts of different kinds of greens with different textures.

And even in the winter, you can have plants with interesting looks like the contorted hazelnut bush. Once all of the leaves drop, those twisted branches really kind of draw your eye into the garden. You really have something beautiful to look at even when there is snow on the ground.

So, there really is a lot to think about when you are planning a garden. You really want to take a look at the plants online or in a book, and not just look at the flowers, but what the color and the texture of that foliage is, so you can combine them and really have nice compliments in your perennial garden.

By Charlie Nardozzi