Garden Gram #21: Flowering Perennials — For Cut Flowers, Think Beyond Annuals

Plus: Spotlight on alliums, two new garden books, seed snails

When zinnias were the only annual flower available to me for a late summer arrangement, I rifled through my Dad’s perennial garden for hydrangeas, coneflowers, sedum, Japanese anemones and various foliage.

For those of us who love to fill the house with cut flowers, it’s hard to wait patiently for annual flowers like zinnias, cosmos, dahlias and sunflowers to bloom. And then when they finally do (halfway through the summer!), we realize we could use a few other kinds of fillers and foliage to make even our most casual of arrangements more interesting. What’s a gardener to do?

Plant perennials! Flowering perennial plants, flowering shrubs, and even bulbs will stretch out your harvest time by weeks — in spring and fall — and offer you all kinds of nifty foliage and secondary flowers to add to your vases.

Baptisia, aka false indigo (left) offers blooms in spring and foliage for arrangements (middle, lower left) all summer; plant alliums and coneflowers (right) for cutting, too.