Gardening greenhorn, need some advice about perennials and care?

by serenithyme

Mrs. S asks: Gardening greenhorn, need some advice about perennials and care?
Hello,

As I mentioned I am new to gardening and I have a couple of questions for seasoned gardeners. I have a small plot along the side of my house and in early June I planted three May Night salvia plants. The blooms are pretty much spent on each of the plants and I did some trimming of the really dry stalks. Should I be trimming the whole thing? I mean trim every stalk right down to the foliage? Right now they are all I have in that plot so if I cut them all down it would look pretty bad, but I’ll do it if it will help it to re-bloom.

This brings me to my next question. What other perennials would look nice with the May Night? I’d like to plant a few different things there so that the garden blooms continuously and never looks like it does now. They would need to be plants that are fairly hardy, can withstand cold Canadian winters and partial sunlight as the garden only gets full sun in the evenings.

Thank you for your help!
I am in Calgary so the zone here is somewhere around 3a or 3b. I really like all flowers, not too picky on colour as long as they look nice.

The answer voted best is:

Answer by KiwiEyes
You definitely need to get rid of the spent blooms: you’ll rejuvinate the foliage too if you prune it way back (not all the way, but get rid of the beat-up leaves, too. They will rebloom!
What you really want to do is to have other perennials that have colors that work well, and that bloom either all at the same time, and then the rest of the year, it’s a green garden, or have perennials that bloom at different times.
Purple works well with pinks and whites, or yellows and whites. What appeals to you?

Need to know your zone to recommend plants… up here in Canada, we go from 0 to 8a. That’s a lot of spread 🙂

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