A promise yet to be fulfilled [03/25]

I’m Nathan Langley and this is A promise yet to be fulfilled, a seasonal weekly newsletter on my garden developments at home in Sudbury, Ontario!

While this week has been slow as I recover from the flu, I did manage to do some planning for my trial garden. The space itself will be 7m x 4m in size, and broken into 1m x 1m blocks.

My garden design process revolves around working with a 1m x 1m grid, so that seemed like a logical place to start. This will give me data on how many perennials it takes to fill those blocks, and will allow me to document the visual character and weight of each perennial at a scale larger than a single plant in a 1 gallon pot.

The larger plan for this trial garden is to start with a plant palette that I like using in my designs (as much as I hate the idea of using a singular ‘palette’ for garden designs), document those plants over several years as they establish, and produce locally derived plant information for my Northern Plant Library.

Once I have gathered enough information, or a perennial fails, I will swap the perennial out for something else I am interested in seeing grow. The nursery trade is changing every year, as are the plants available to use, so I need to be able to keep up with that information.

I also don’t want to make my entire front yard a trial garden (I have to live here too!). So a larger scale trial garden will have to wait. But despite the constrained footprint, I believe I can create a valuable tool for the future.

So what plants will start with? I have 24 1m x 1m blocks to work with, and have most of the plants I would like to see grow on site already (they are the ones in my online perennial plant store!). I’ve used some of those perennials to create my border garden along the driveway, so I don’t need to use them again in the trial garden. But there are still lots to choose from. Here is what I have so far:

(1) Achillea (x2)

(2) Amsonia hubrichtii

(3) Amsonia cultivar

(4) Asclepias tuberosa

(5) Aster dumosus (x2)

(6) Baptisia ‘Burgundy Blast’

(7) Echinacea (x2)

(8) Echinops ritro ‘Veitch’s Blue’

(9) Epimedium (x2)

(10) Eryngium (x2)

(11) Helenium (x2)

(12) Nepeta (x2)

(13) Perovskia

(14) Persicaria amplexicaulis & P. bistorta

(15) Saliva (x2)

(16) Stachys (x2)

(17) Tiarella (x2)

(18) Vernonia lettermannii ‘Iron Butterfly’

(19) Veronicastrum virginicum

(20) Calamagrostis brachytricha

(21) Carex pensylvanica

(22) Molinia caerulea ‘Moorflamme’

(23)

(24)

Some of these perennials I haven’t sourced yet, but are keen to do so. The other thing to note is the (x2) next to some of the names. For those, I intend to split the 1m x 1m blocks into two 1m x 0.5m blocks so that I can trial cultivars next to each other. For these specific perennials, their maximum listed width is 60cm or less, so I can make better use of the blocks than just filling them up with one cultivar.

For the week ahead, I need to catch up on all the basic maintenance that I fell behind on this past week while ill. Otherwise, I will be entirely focused on continuing my work on turning over the soil in the trial garden area. While there isn’t a panic to have the space ready yet, I would like it done Before September hits.