Making a garden of perennials — Key Ideas to Explore

A Voice of Practical Authority

Egan’s prose is that of a seasoned gardener talking to a neighbor. He uses the first person sparingly but effectively: “Besides colonies I have established in my ravine, where the overhanging underbrush hides its absence later on, I grow it under large bushes of forsythia.” This personal note grounds his advice in real experience. He does not merely list plants; he describes their habits with precision. Of the gas plant (Dictamnus fraxinella), he notes that “some people are still enjoying the blooms of plants set out by their great-grandmothers.” The tone is confident but not boastful, and he freely admits when a plant is difficult, as with Anchusa Italica, which “does not winter well.” His voice carries the authority of someone who has dug the beds himself.

Rhythms of Growth and Disappearance

Egan pays close attention to the temporal life of perennials—not just when they bloom, but what happens afterward. He describes the shooting star (Dodecatheon) and Virginia bluebell (Mertensia Virginica) as plants that “turn brown, dies back and disappears to return again next spring.” This creates a problem of bare ground, which he solves by pairing the bluebell with forsythia: “After flowering, the forsythia hides the disrobing Mertensia with its heavy sheet of foliage.” He also notes that bleeding heart and perennial poppy have “ragged foliage after blooming” and recommends placing “tall bushy plants” in front. These observations reveal a gardener thinking in sequences, not static pictures.

Weeding as Cultivation, Not Chore

Egan’s chapter on weeding is characteristic in its paradoxical logic: “the weed is the best friend the farmer has because it compels him to cultivate his land.” He advises hoeing “the day after a heavy rain or a good watering” and prefers a “hot, windy day” because “the wind and sun kill the uprooted weeds in a short time.” The enemy is couch grass, which if left “near the base of a plant” will send down roots “among those of the plant, and it is almost impossible to get them out without taking the plant up.” His method is preventive: “The time to weed is before you see the weeds.” This is not a generic tip but a specific tactic born of repeated failure and success.

Egan’s book rewards a slow reading, one that follows his eye from the bed to the individual plant to the calendar. He is less concerned with botanical names than with how a plant behaves in a specific spot—whether it leaves bare ground, needs support, or outlives its owner. Readers will find that the lists of perennials at the end are best used as a starting point, not a final word; the real instruction lies in Egan’s offhand remarks about what he has tried and what has worked.

Flicking through Making a garden of perennials the other evening, I found myself resting on the author’s patient insistence about the ground being the quiet groundwork for everything above. It drifted, unbidden, toward that bright practical voice in How and what to grow in a kitchen garden of one acre — Context and Discussion—two men, a generation apart, both simply trusting the soil to do its work. A gentle kinship there, one I hadn’t expected to notice.