Gardening, for most of us, is a double-edged sword.
On the sharp side, there’s the unquenchable quest to grow every single plant native to the planet. We yearn for the most stunning of local natives but also lust for the most ethereal of exotics from lands far away. All it takes is one picture of one of those luminous blue, Tibetan poppies and we lose all sense, common and otherwise.
And on the sharper side, we want everything we plant to live ... and not just live but thrive. Despite knowing full well that those Tibetan poppies hate anything worse than a 75-degree day, we can’t help but whine a bit when they wilt and wither in the heat and drought of a Kentucky summer.
So my self-appointed gardener’s challenge for this dog day season is to walk the gardens at Yew Dell Botanical Gardens, keep my eyes peeled while walking the dog around my neighborhood and pay attention while driving around town, and come up with a small handful of plants that just plain work in the heat and drought of late summer in Kentucky.
Remove all the romance, the mysticism and the mail-order-catalog-inspired misty eyes for the rare and unusual, and come up with a shortlist of plants that require no special care and still look good.
So here’s the list — a shade tree, a shrub, an evergreen, a perennial and an annual/tropical. If you’re looking to plant your first garden, these will give you a good place to start. If you have an existing garden, maybe one of these will make a nice replacement for something you’ve been trying to kill for years.
In the looks-great-all-summer-no-matter-how-hot-and-dry-it-gets category, the Kentucky Coffee Tree (Gymnocladus dioicus) is hard to beat. Growing to an upright oval of 50-feet-tall or a bit more, it offers a loose, lacey shade cast by blue-green foliage. A relatively deep-rooted species, it is easy to garden in its shade — no wildly aggressive maple roots to deal with on this one. Fall color is a gleaming yellow and the bark is a light gray, scaly affair.
