A Whiter Shade of Pale
Posted in Gardening Tips on July 23 2013, by Sonia Uyterhoeven
Sonia Uyterhoeven is the NYBG‘s Gardener for Public Education.
When Keith Reid penned the famous lyrics to the debut song for the British rock group Procol Harum in 1967, his inspiration for the title came from a conversation he had overheard at a party when a man exclaimed to a woman, “You have turned a whiter shade of pale.”
Reid thought it was a cool compliment and wished he had uttered the phrase. Quite frankly, I am glad I wasn’t the woman. Coming from the tan generation, I don’t think I would have taken kindly to the utterance.
If pale was trendy in the UK in 1967, it’s certainly still trendy in the NYC plant world in 2013. I was giving a class on perennial garden maintenance as part of my Home Gardening Series, which meets every Saturday and Sunday at 2 p.m. (free to all garden visitors), and I was amazed at how many ‘rad’— or should I date myself and say ‘groovy’—perennials were a whiter shade of pale.
Phlox carolina ‘Miss Lingard’ seems to be popping up everywhere this year. I see her in the new Native Plant Garden, in the Children’s Adventure Garden, in the Home Gardening Center and on my tours of the High Line. She is an early version of the stalwart Phlox paniculata ‘David’—a must for any white garden.
Like ‘David’, ‘Miss Lingard’ has excellent resistance to powdery mildew that can often plague phlox. She flowers early in June and then if you shear her back after bloom she will reward you by flowering again. To tell you the truth, she is re-blooming in the garden even in areas where we didn’t remove the spent blooms. Good on her. So far we haven’t needed to stake her three-foot stems.
Another knock out white for your garden is Echinacea purpurea ‘Pow Wow White’. I know some of you are groaning and saying “not another coneflower,” but this one has large white flowers that scream “look at me!” and strong sturdy stems. So why not give it a try?
‘Pow Wow White’ is one of the newer cultivars that will produce a full flush in early to mid-summer and then flower sporadically for the rest of the season. What I like about some of these newer powerhouse varieties is that if you get lazy and forget to deadhead them, they will still continue to bloom vigorously. In our garden you can see flowers in full bloom with many buds starting to push for a second flush.
For those of you who live in deer country, we were also admiring a perennial that we have had in the Garden for years, Caryopteris divaricata ‘Snow Fairy’. It is a perennial blue beard with nice but fairly insignificant blue flowers later in the season. The real show is the variegated foliage. It looks divine in a white border and lovely planted with virtually anything else.
If you are wondering why it is deer resistant (rabbit resistant as well), pluck off a few leaves and smell the foliage. It smells like unripe green peppers on a good day and kitty litter on a bad one. I am not surprised that critters avoid it.
If you are in the market for white, then this is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of sturdy, no-nonsense perennials for your garden. What I like so much about white is that it shows up beautifully in the evening so that you can enjoy it after a long day at work. So why not put on the soundtrack to The Big Chill, hum a few bars of that famous Procol Harum song—you do know it—and relax in your beautiful gardens.
