02/16/10

Perennials For the Prairies

     The following lists of perennials have two columns. The first column has codes used by the Aruuki Artisans Group Inc. when creating designs for clients. The Second row has the most common names used in nurseries. This is actually a bit of a problem. Most books and order catalogues are written only in Latin, and common names are not uniform. In many cases they are different even within the province let alone between provinces. For the most part I have used the Latin name first and then put the common name in brackets except in the cases where people only use the common name e.g. Lily-of-the-Valley, Bleeding Heart or use only the Latin name e.g. Delphinium, Sedum, Hosta. Within the quotes are the most common and most successful varieties used on the prairies. Many of these varieties were developed in the prairie provinces of Manitoba, Saskatchewan, or Alberta. As well, you should be able to find these varieties in almost all nurseries and often in the large box stores like Canadian Tire, Wal-mart, Rona Revy, etc.. There are many more varieties but for this site I wanted to pull the most hardy and available.

Just as a note about the code letters. They may seem all random but there is some method to them. They are  based on the Latin name in most cases pulling the first two letters of the genus. E.g.. Goutweed uses Ae for Aegopodium, Lady's Mantle uses AL for Alchemilla. For Bergenia the letters match too closely to another genus so an alternate letter was chosen - Bg.  For very large genera like Campanula (Bellflower) I use the genus and species. Example Cc - is Campanula carpatica, Cg is Campanula glomerata, Cp  is Campanula persicifolia. You can see with the size of the names that it is much easier to use the Code letters.

Click on the plants that are underlined have a link to go to a description of the plant with a picture