Summary:
Those who don´t have the luxury of year-round gardening opportunities can do the next-best thing - sssstrettttcccchhhh out the blooming season for at least seven months. Five tips from the pros.

Details or Sample:
If you live in a temperate climate, feel free to wander off to count your blessings (or admire your glorious landscape) while the rest of us living in areas with well-defined seasons figure out how to make the most of the time we have left — time, that is, before winter rears its icy head again.

One way to trick ourselves into thinking the time between mid-April and mid-November is longer than it really is is to give ourselves seven months of continual outdoor color. And all that takes is a little time for planning and a little more time for planting, whether for perennial flowers, groundcover, shrubs, or trees (all of which will hereafter be referred to, for simplicity’s sake, as “plants”). Here are five key tips from landscape professionals:
• Know which plant hardiness zone you find yourself in. Hard-core gardeners consider their planting zone as important as their area code. Purchasing bulbs and plants from area greenhouses is usually goof-proof, because they don’t sell inappropriate plant stock. If you’re a print or online catalog shopper, though, it’s easy to be seduced by breathtaking color photographs. Absent a background check, however, a gorgeous exotic-looking specimen could very well develop hypothermia, lie down, and die, never ever to be seen again. To avoid wasting time, money, and energy, simply check a map in a reliable gardening book or online to know what plants have a fighting chance of making it from one season to the next where you live.

• Once your trees have leafed out, watch for a few days to learn how much sun shines upon your wannabe garden plots. There may be areas of direct sun, part sun and part shade, and full shade. Many green-thumbers will claim the more sun the better, but don’t give short shrift to shade-loving shrubs and flowers. Granted, it’s harder to create a riot of color in a shady corner, but it just requires a bit more diligence when selecting what to plant (don’t worry – all the information you need is on the tag or label). Hydrangeas, some geraniums, and impatiens will perk up fully shaded areas, along with any of the thousands of varieties of hosta. Speaking of hosta, they’re not all just boring green and white — they vary from golden to cream and bluish- to lime-green; one variety has seersucker-like leaves, another has leaves the size of a dinner plate, and they all have beautiful white or lavender blooms of all sizes and shapes.

• Decide on your fundamental color scheme. Do you want a continuous mix of color from your perennials — for example, yellow narcissus, purple lilac bushes, red roses, orange daylilies, and bronze mums, supplemented by colorful annuals like cosmos, marigolds, and petunias? Or maybe pockets of color throughout the season, for example, all yellows in one corner, blues along the...

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Written by: gigi
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