Pam’s Plant Picks: Splash of Spring Color

Home & Garden Seattle’s garden expert Pam Jones shares these tips for bringing a splash of spring color to your home garden.

Geum:  Brighten your flower borders and beds this spring and summer with geums.  These perennials feature beautiful saucer to bowl shaped flowers that come in a variety of cheerful colors, from yellow and orange to red and pink.  Some have contrasting stamens, depending on the variety.  Bloom time varies by variety, but most flowers start in late spring and some will continue through summer.  Geums feature textured leaves in basal rosette clumps.  These sun loving plants thrive on fertile, humus rich soil tending toward the moist side, and vary in size from 12-24 inches high and 16-24 inches wide.

Bergenia: This four-season woodland garden performer works well either as a border planting or ground cover.  An evergreen perennial, bergenia features clumps of leathering leaves in various shades of green, with red or bronze tints in some varieties.  Clusters of flowers in shades of pink, purple or white appear in spring, on red or purple stems.  Plants take on a red or bronze purple tone in winter.  Bergenia grows 12 - 18 inches tall and about 18 - 24 inches wide.  It prefers moist but well drained, humus rich soil in full sun to partial shade.

Cranesbill Geraniums:  Also known as hardy geraniums, these perennials are very different from the annual geraniums we see planted in the summer.  With more than 300 varieties, cranesbill comes in a variety of sizes from 18 inches high to six feet tall, and from a variety of conditions from alpine (rock garden) to moist to woodland, with most preferring a moderately fertile, well drained soil in full to partial shade.  Varieties include G. cinereum, a dwarf rosette forming evergreen perennial with pale pink flowers to G. sylvaticum (wood cranesbill), a clump forming herbaceous perennial that flowers heavily in shades of blue-purple, pinkish-purple, pink or white.

All Image Sources: Pete Rowen