Gardening With Perennials ─ Lessons from Chicago's Lurie Garden

Since its opening on July 16, 2004, the Lurie Garden in Chicago’s Millennium Park has attracted an enormous amount of attention. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, of people pass through it every day, often on a regular basis. This book enables and inspires them to do just that, while providing those who haven’t or won’t ever visit the Lurie with a wonderful introduction to native gardening. It introduces readers to the art and science of perennial gardening, with a particular focus on native plants. Perennials offer more for the home gardener than any other group of plants. They are small enough to plant creatively in restricted spaces, and long-lived enough to develop continuity and improve the sustainability of the garden. This book introduces garden perennials, using the plants of the Lurie Garden as a guide. It is not aimed at being a comprehensive guide to perennials, but starts with the idea that the range of plants used in the Lurie Garden forms a good basis for home-owners new to growing perennials or indeed to the whole world of gardening. The range of perennials in the Lurie Garden is actually very wide, although with an emphasis on species that flourish in sun rather than shade. It also includes many regionally native species--more than half.