Your Second Home: Hardy Perennials to the Rescue

We bought our cabin in the beautiful North Georgia mountains in the dead of winter. When we came up from Atlanta on the weekends during the cold months, we busied ourselves on the inside of the cabin making it our cozy nest.

Once Spring arrived, we welcomed the opportunity to start digging and planting. We planted what we thought were hardy varieties of plants, and for a few months - as we came up weekend to weekend - we were delighted to see the progress that our 'babies' were making.  Come May, we sank a pretty penny into buying hanging baskets of ferns and planting container gardens stuffed with showy annuals. And for the first few weekends, a splendid riot of color greeted us when the cabin came into view.

Then came the Summer months. Our hanging baskets were the first to go. Colorless and panting plants drooping over the sides of the baskets were our welcome committee when we came up on the weekends, and we soon realized that a once-a-week drenching was not going to be enough for our baskets and container  gardens, even those in the shade - never mind the ones that required full sun.  Then, the plants in the garden started to shrivel up one-by-one as June turned into July turned into August. By Summer's end, we were left with only a few stunted plants that had managed to eke out a living in the relentless sun with only a watering once a week.

Speaking with other weekenders, we found that most of them had similar experiences, and we commiserated with one another.  So, we resigned ourselves to the fact that a colorful garden would have to wait until we moved up to the cabin full time.

An article in today's Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Perennials top list for Atlanta gardens, outlines a list of hardy perennials that have thrived in Atlanta's historic Oakland Cemetery with little care. They include hosta, Bath's Pink, phlox, bearded iris, and other hardy varieties that require little attention to yield lots of color.

As planting season approaches (finally!!!), second-home owners in the North Georgia mountains might consider some of the stalwarts on this list to help them plant a garden that will provide color and texture, even when ignored.