Backyard foraging – proposing perennials

August 11, 2025

I have always loved to make bouquets, using favourites from my garden, and always including some wildflowers to add to the fun. Over time, I’ve gotten to know which flowers stay fresh and perky for several days without dropping their petals, and I try to maintain lots of these in my garden.

My mother gave me two good pieces of bouquet advice: take a bucket of water out to the garden when picking the flowers and drop the stems immediately in, so there’s no chance of them wilting. She also shared that bouquets should have a good backdrop of green, so that the colours of the blossoms are really accentuated.

I have built on this by starting a bouquet with a small branch or two from a bush with attractive leaves, so that the woody structure helps to hold the flower stems in place. If it extends horizontally a bit, it gives a good structure to allow you to place the flowers

“just ever so.”

The native shrub called high bush cranberry is a great starting place for greenery, and it also wins hands-down for flowers and attractive berries. Peony leaves provide a good structure, and you can try just about anything you like the look of, that doesn’t wilt when picked, as some do. I also like to use foliage

of purple-leaved shrubs like smoke bush to set off daylilies, in bouquets that I like to call “drama queens” because they’re a bit over-the-top.

I like to have one bold blossom that I consider the centre-piece – like iris, dahlia, peony, or gladiolus. But if I don’t have a showstopper, three larger blossoms loosely arranged in a triangle provides a good focus.

After this, lots of small colour brings sparkle and, if available, some white or cream-coloured blossoms really bring out the other colours.

We all have our own tastes, and I like a loose natural look, so some wispy greens such as tall grasses, daffodil leaves, or (my favourite) asparagus fronds poking out of the top of the arrangement just adds that special touch for me.

Choosing the right variety of flowers for your garden can give you bouquets through the whole season, from spring bulbs to fall Chinese lanterns. Investing in biennials and perennials means you’ll have a supply that returns every year, but these have

shorter blooming periods during each season.

Many gardeners will also plant or buy annuals that need to be planted a little later but keep flowering all through the season. Some great long-lasting annual cut flowers that I try to grow from seed every year are cosmos, strawflowers, calendula and zinnia.

Perennials will survive from year to year if you
plant them in the right conditions and keep down competition from weeds. They’ll usually have about a two-week blooming period, and I grow a variety of perennials that bloom at different times, so that there are flowers for the whole season. You can pick as many flowers as you like from a perennial. In fact, picking helps to keep the plant strong.

My favourite long-lasting bouquet perennials are Shasta daisy, bee balm, coneflower, peony, astilbe, ladies’ mantle, tansy, and feverfew. Other favourites are irises and day lilies which have flowers that
fade quickly, but one stem has a few buds that will continue to bloom in the vase, so they’ll still provide colour for the week.

Old standards like tulip and daffodil bulbs can’t be beat. But you can also consider lily and allium bulbs that come back yearly. There are some other bulbs that require a little bit of work, but are worthwhile for me, because their blossoms are so striking. Dahlias and gladiolus are planted in the spring, to

flower in the summer, and then need to be lifted in the fall. The roots are stored in a cool dry place, then replanted in late spring.

Biennials take two years to flower, and many produce seeds that can survive our winters. So once established, they essentially act like a perennial, coming back every year. The catch here is that you cannot pick ALL of the blossoms, because that prevents them from going to seed to grow for future seasons. Brown-eyed Susans are the most cheerful addition to a bouquet, and foxgloves, sweet William, and silver dollar (also known as honesty) are other biennials well worth growing.

Goldenrod and Queen Anne’s lace are wildflowers that are absolute staples in my mid-summer bouquets and are very easy to come across in unmown areas, and it’s always nice to have a small patch of lupines. I am careful to only pick flowers that are really common, so that I don’t deplete populations of rare flowers.

Caroline Cameron lives in Strathlorne, and offers gardening and guiding services around Cape Breton Island. Please submit any gardening tips, questions, and news to strathlorne@gmail.com and visit Facebook at Nature/Nurture Gardening & Hiking.