What perrenials are you purposely avoiding, and why?
I am avoiding cannas, because they are too big to overwinter indoors and it is too cold outside to keep them as reliable perrenials.

Or, what do you think is the worst perrenial?

Anything that is invasive . A mistake I have made to many times.

Just as Bob said. I've tried to avoid rabid runners and seeders, though it's still taken a lot of effort to eliminate several of them from our garden. For me, tamer cultivars are worth the greater expense.

On the other hand, there's no point in continuing to waste money on plants which just don't do well in your garden. For me, it's become quite clear which penstemons work and which don't. So, even though I love the colour of their flowers, I've stopped wasting money on the latter.

For simply personal taste, my greatest dislike is for the invasive spring bulbs chionodoxa and puschkinia; definitely the worst perennials I've ever dealt with. They quickly form spotty, open clumps and are very difficult to dig out of the lawn. Still, many gardeners say that they love them!

Not a big fan of tulips or daffodils.

Flowering Quince is a terrible shrub that spreads with underground tubelike shoots. I prefer shrubs that are more treelike.

Catnip. I like the hybrids that are sterile.

Black eyed Susan.... weed

Most ornamental grass. If you plant them in an area where you can burn them in the winter, they are good.

Low growing junipers (~6 inches). Weeds are impossible to control even if you use weed fabric under.

Black Walnut trees kill many plants in its drip-line. The fallen walnuts are also a mess.

Do not like most Salvia. Short lived ugly plants.

Burning Bush. Ugly shrub for 51 weeks in a year.

Max the dog does not like black walnuts. We went to a park with a lot of them last year during fall, and max hated the smell/scent so much he wouldn't go into the trail.

Could it be possible that black walnuts could cause roofing problems if it were really big?

I find that daffodils are nice, only in large drifts though. I do not like their dying foilage though.

Aspidistra (cast iron plant) ring around a tree. They always look damaged.

Crape murder, pollarded crapes.

Nandina, runners, ongoing maintenance of chopping down older stems when they ugli-fy.

Betony (Stachys.) Ephemeral but if you would be bothered by a solid cover of this for a few weeks, don't start any. Definitely delicious, but hard as heck to find the tubers/rhizomes which are not necessarily under the visible stems.

I always enjoy these love/hate threads. So different for everyone, and much depends on your climate.

Quince reminds me of my Dad, who tried unsuccessfully for literally years to kill one in their front yard. So, for me, it is a rather fond memory and I love my quince. I planted it (yes, a start from Dad) in an area it can have as much elbow room as it likes.

Burning bush is my favorite shrub, well behaved with year round interest, no pruning needed. It is not invasive in my area, but I can understand when a plant gets a bit too jolly.

I'm also not a fan of tulips, they are just brief lollypops for me with rather unfortunate foliage. I do enjoy daffodils and plant more every year - often in my wild areas so they can multiply at will. For those inside my yard, I cut the foliage back after the bloom fades - usually not advised but I've never noticed any ill effects when doing so. I actually did an experiment one year of two patches of same daffodil - one I let the foliage die as recommended, the other I wacked back to about 6" - they both looked exactly the same the following year.

Junipers often smell like cat pee to me, which is off-putting. Boring (to me) but a nice rockery plant, particularly the small ones.

I guess to choose a perennial I avoid it might be pigsqueak. I'm not too fond of short squatty plants and every time I've tried this, it has not done well for me. Maybe it senses my distaste...

And, not to start an uproar, but to me daylillies are just nice fillers. I would never pay the astronomical price that the officianados seem to shrug off. In the plant's defense, they are one of the first to emerge in the spring, blend well with other flowers, but mostly are just kind of blah for me.

One that got away from me is Euphorbia fens ruby - that pretty little thing wants to take over my universe.

I find squatty plants hard to clean out as we have this tree that self-seeds EVERYWHERE and it is hard to weed in them.

I find daylily foilage boring so i plant it in the back. I think that way it looks better.

Perhaps less than the "worst" perennial, but I'm so sick of seeing azaleas in my area. Most people who plant them do so because they are shade-tolerant, and while they'll still bloom nicely for about 30 seconds in a shady area, they will also be extremely spindly in that shady bed. So you get really pretty blooms for a couple days and a shrub that looks like it's dying the rest of the year. Easily 3/4 of my neighbors have a sickly-looking azalea or 7 in their yard...very pretty right now, but in a week, they'll go back to their "I'm gonna look like I'm dying, but not actually die" state for the next 11.5 months.

Yes, I have a couple of Azaleas and they do not grow well for me. I bought them on sale at Lowes. If I find them again on sale, I will pass:)

dachiri said:Perhaps less than the "worst" perennial, but I'm so sick of seeing azaleas in my area. Most people who plant them do so because they are shade-tolerant, and while they'll still bloom nicely for about 30 seconds in a shady area, they will also be extremely spindly in that shady bed. So you get really pretty blooms for a couple days and a shrub that looks like it's dying the rest of the year. Easily 3/4 of my neighbors have a sickly-looking azalea or 7 in their yard...very pretty right now, but in a week, they'll go back to their "I'm gonna look like I'm dying, but not actually die" state for the next 11.5 months.

Big bushy azaleas are great... well... .um... until it rains....

The pretty bushy pink fluffballs turn into mushy messes of old flowers after it rains. Eww. They are boring for 90% of the year. They work good as a bathroom for Max though!

Picky bunch, aren't we?
Still, that's the problem of becoming connoisseurs!.

What about what ones you think are the best and why? I'm a plant geek, so I like most plants!

I don't consider it picky, just focused on preferences, and avoiding things which have not been satisfactory.

Just remembered Oenothera speciosa, pink buttercups. As a new gardener, I saw a little pot in bloom and put it in the ground. In the spring, it was a patch almost 2 feet across. I try to avoid anything that creeps and is more than a few inches tall, so I can see tree sprouts.

I find azaleas lovely, might be my temperate climate. I get about 2 weeks of bloom, and the rest of the season a tidy shrub. My current favorite is R. occidentale, our native western azalea.

Wow.

Guess what, IT RAINED DURING THE NIGHT YEStERDAY! Oh well, at least it ends the spring drought.

I came outside this morning with a rake and banged the azaleas. It works for me, and scrapes off the spent blooms and keeps most of the fresh ones.

I should clarify that I don't *hate* azaleas. They can be very pretty, if a bit boring for most of the year, if they get some sun. My complaint was largely about people planting them specifically as shade-tolerant plants, which they are, but their foliage is spindly in shady locations. So they bloom nicely, but briefly, but then are kind of an eyesore throughout the rest of the year.

I'm with you sedumzz, I hadn't had rain in quite a while before last night, and got almost an inch! Everything looks a little perkier today!

crawgarden said:What about what ones you think are the best and why? I'm a plant geek, so I like most plants!

On the flip side of people planting azaleas for shade tolerance are people who pick a good shade-tolerant phlox. I live on the side of a hill (I wasn't born here, AND LIVE ON THE FLAT PART, so no jokes about one leg being longer than the other one still ;) ), so most people have retaining walls, and a nice creeping phlox looks AMAZING spilling down the hill and over the wall. It's cheap, it's easy, and it's pretty.

My neighbor up the street (the corner lot, of course) has a huge stand of a variety of morning glories against his fence line (sharp drop-off down to a chain link fence you can't even see anymore, so they have filled in a 3' wide "valley", which is just beautiful to walk past. Whites and reds and purples coming and going. He has the bossest yard in the neighborhood in many, many, ways, but those always make me smile.

All my selections are under 2 years old, so I may have something more to say on this in a couple years. I think I chose well, but time will tell! Here's my "early" blooming Siberian iris for fun. :)

I adore phlox. Moss phlox is great groundcover, and Max LOVES smelling it!! I also love the upright phloxes, and they provide pretty much constant blooms till winter. In spring there's Phlox divarcata with the tulips, creeping phlox as a transition, Phlox paniculata in late summer and fall...

Azaleas really are "wow" in this area in the shade. They get enormous, as big as a van.