Perennials for your garden

Last night we went to a garden walk/class about perennials at the UW-Madison demonstration gardens on Mineral Point Rd. It was free and we got a lot of good information. At first, Adam and I were worried because the gardener started out by saying "I'd like to talk about some of the plants about which we get the most questions: clematis and peonies." Now - there is nothing wrong with clematis and peonies, but that is definitely not the type of plant that we came to hear about. We were hoping for native perennials and more unusual plants. Fortunately, after she talked about those for a little while, we actually started going around the gardens and talking about a wide variety of plants. One plant that we really liked (and is native too) is blue false indigo. It's more of a shrub. I think we're going to get one of those for our back landscaping bed. We also saw some cool sedums. I know, usually those are rather boring, but the ones we saw were purple and blue and were almost ground cover. They had some unusual kinds of lavender (and assured us they could grow here) that we liked. The prairie area was somewhat of a disappointment because nothing had labels, the plants were all smushed together so it was hard to see anything, and the gardener didn't take us over there during the tour to explain anything. We did confirm that we want some prairie dropseed grass. It's fairly short and puffy. All in all, a worthwhile evening. They have these walks every few weeks, and the gardens are open to the public all the time. Most plant have nice lables with both the common name and the scientific name and there are brochures all over that list out which plants are in each area.