How do you find the right plant for those less-than hospitable places in your yard or landscape? Here are a few such spots and the perfect plants for them, with 6 landscape solutions.

LOCATION: Driveway and/or side of road.

SOLUTION 1: Next Generation Flower Carpet^® roses for continuous, season-long blooms, road salt tolerance and outstanding cold, heat and humidity resistance.  Flower Carpet^® Pink Supreme shown below makes a nice greeting for people as they come in from the road.  Other heat tolerant plants for driveways include Angelina stonecrop, Silver Mound artemisia and creeping juniper.  These can all be interplanted with Flower Carpet roses for a more textured look.

SOLUTION 2: Festival™ cordylines (also known as Fountain™ cordylines – seen below holding up to high heat along an elevated driveway planting) stand up to high heat and are ideal as a curbside or driveway planting in warmer climates.

LOCATION: Narrow space that could use some colour.

SOLUTION: Tropicanna^® cannas, which offer psychedelically coloured foliage all season long.  Mix with a variety of annuals and perennials or plant “en-masse” for maximum impact. It looks great when interplanted as a tall backdrop with crocosmia (warm climates) and bright marigolds (cooler climates).

LOCATION: Dry, hot site

SOLUTION: Use xeriscaping strategies like mulching, soil amendments, turf grass reduction, land contouring to catch rainfall, irrigation control technology and proper plant placement and spacing. In the landscape and in containers, also use water-wise plants, like Flower Carpet® roses (shown below, thriving at a winery in northern California), the architectural Storm™ series of agapanthus and Festival™ cordylines.

LOCATION: Hot, sunny walkway that needs softening

SOLUTION: Storm™ series of agapanthus (including the deep blue-flowered Blue Storm and the white-bloomed Snow Storm shown below).  If you’ve got a piece of hardscaping like pavers or a walkway, the ground around it tends to heat up even more. In these spots, the Storm agapanthus series is a great choice, especially if you’re looking for something different with an exotic, architectural look. Unlike other agapanthus, it also has a shorter, denser, clump-forming habit and has been known to rebloom two to three times a gardening season. 

LOCATION: Slope or hill

SOLUTION: The simplest solution for landscaping a slope – which people often want to fill with something besides turf grass, because they don’t want to mow – is groundcovers. There are many foliage-only options out there, but if you want season-long colour and blooms, an excellent choice is Flower Carpet® groundcover roses. They root deeply and therefore provide erosion control. Salt and drought tolerant, they’re also perfect for slopes by the road that get sprayed with road salt in winter, and any slope in summer (since the water runs off of steep grades, making slopes very quick to dry out in the heat). And when planted in masses, Flower Carpet roses like Flower Carpet Coral shown below provide quickly spreading coverage.

LOCATION: Wet or damp conditions

SOLUTION: Use one of today’s modern, disease-resistant plant varieties that resist fungal problems thriving in wet weather, like Festival or Fountain cordylines, Tropicanna cannas (seen below) or the Storm series of agapanthus, for instance. Flower Carpet roses, meanwhile, have earned many All-Deutschland-Rose designations – the world’s highest honour for disease resistance against fungal diseases like black spot.  The Next Generation Flower Carpet roses have been bred for even greater heat and humidity tolerance.