Plant These 7 LONG-LASTING Perennials ONCE - Blooms For 20 Years (Some Live 100!

20 years, some 100. That's the lifespan of the seven perennials I'm about to show you. Now walk into your local nursery this weekend and count how many three-year plants they are selling you. Count the annual beds, count the impulse buys, buy the register. That is the business model. You buy, it dies next year, you come back, you buy again. Plant the right seven perennials once and you never come back. That's why they don't push them. I'll rank these seven from those that will outlive your mortgage to those that will outlive you. Number one, you've probably already seen in your grandmother's yard. Big silky flowers the size of a grapefruit in May. I've been sitting on it for the reveal. Stay with me. Number seven, bearded iris, iris germanica. If you live in America and you're over 60, your grandmother or your great aunt had these in her yard somewhere, probably by the mailbox. Plant a fan of rhizomes now in April and you'll get that first wave of silk petal flowers next May. After that, every single year for 20 to 30 years. Here's the thing nobody told your grandmother. Every three or four years you have to dig the rhizomes up, split them apart with a bread knife and replant. It takes 10 minutes. If you skip it, the clump gets overcrowded and stops blooming. And every year somebody calls a nursery asking what happened to their iris. Nothing happened. You just have to divide them. Do that and they will outlive your mortgage. Number six, hostas. And I know half of you just sighed, I already have hostas. Tell me something new. Fine, here it is. The hosta you already have is the one the nursery wants you to have. Small, slow, undramatic. The one that actually stops traffic is the one they barely stock. Empress Wu. Plant her now. Give her five years and you will have a single leaf the size of a dinner plate and a clump six feet across. One woman in my cousin's neighborhood pulls over every August just to photograph his. He planted it in 2017. Hostas live 30 years. Some varieties longer. They divide easily in year four or five. One plant becomes four and then 16. In 10 years you have landscaped a quarter of your yard for the price of one Empress Wu pot. Number five, Siberian iris. Iris Siberica. Not the one your grandmother had. This is the refined cousin. Bearded iris must be divided every three years. Siberian, plant it and forget it. I have a clump in my yard that went in in 2009. Somewhere around there and I have not touched it once. Not divided, not fertilized, not watered. Every June it throws up a column of narrow, grass-like leaves four feet tall and on top blue violet flowers shaped like silk origami. 25 years easy. Longer if you plant it somewhere it likes. It handles wet soil that kills every other iris. It handles heavy clay. It does not care. Here's the plant you give your daughter-in-law when she says, I can't keep anything alive. Quick one before I keep going. My mother had Siberian iris along the fence of her vegetable garden. This was in Ohio back in the late 1980s. She never did anything to them. The fence leaned more each year. The garden got weedy. She got older. The iris just kept coming up every June. Same spot, same blue. The fence is gone now. The house sold. Somebody else lives there. Those iris are probably still coming up. Number four. Bleeding heart. The old Latin name was Dicentra spectabilis. They moved it into a different genus called Lamprocapnos about 20 some years ago. But nobody uses that name. Don't worry about it. This plant lives 20 to 25 years in a shady spot and it is, I'll say it, the most sentimental plant in the American garden. Every cottage garden photo you've ever seen has one of these arching stems, rows of heart-shaped pink flowers dangling from them like little lockets. Here is what nobody tells you. Bleeding heart goes dormant in midsummer. The leaves yellow and the stems collapse and you think it died. It did not. It just went to sleep until next April. Plant a hosta beside it. The hosta fills the gap and you have spring color from the heart and summer foliage from the hosta for the next two decades. Number three. Daylily. Hemerocallis. The name means beautiful for a day. Each flower only lasts 24 hours, but the plant puts out dozens of buds on each stalk over six weeks. Chicago Botanic Garden ran a daylily trial. They tested over 50 cultivars. The ones that came out on top, after years of neglect, no fertilizer, no watering, no division, were the old reliable ones, not the fancy re-blooming hybrids. Happy Returns, Stella D'Oro, Autumn Minaret, and Sammy Russell. Stella D'Oro gets a bad rap, I will give you that one. Those you plant once and 25 years later, they're still there, throwing up yellow and gold and red stalks in July. I have never met a gardener who regretted planting daylilies, not one. Number two. The Lenten Rose. Haliburus orientalis. And this is the plant on this list that most of you have never planted, and every one of you should. Here's the thing nobody ever mentions. Haliburus blooms in February. February. When there's still snow on the north side of your house, and every other plant in your yard is a dead stick, these are sending up flower buds. By March, they're in full color, nodding cups of pink, purple, white, and speckled green, and they hold for six weeks. A 25-year life. Evergreen leaves all winter. Deer and rabbits don't touch them. Shade departs shade. A plant that blooms while everybody else is still looking at a brown yard. I'll be honest, I'm amazed this plant isn't in every American yard yet. It's slowly catching on. Be early. Before I give you number one, let me say one thing. These first six are already better than 90 percent of what your neighbors are planting this spring. Any one of them is going to outlast the next president, probably the one after that. But number one is in a different category. It doesn't just outlive your neighbor's gardens. It outlives the gardeners. That's why I saved it for last. Number one, peony. Paeonia lactiflora. The queen. I'll just give you the numbers. The oldest documented peonies in America are at Longwood Gardens in Pennsylvania. They went into the ground around 1920. That's over a century ago. Same plants, same blooms, every May. Somebody's great grandmother saw those plants flower. Now somebody's great granddaughter does. And those are not outliers. The American Peony Society keeps a heritage register of specimens over a hundred years old scattered across the East Coast and the Midwest in private yards next to farmhouses that have been sold three times. Those peonies do not care who lives there. They just bloom. Plant a peony in April. Full sun. Deep, rich soil. Set the eyes no more than two inches below the surface. This is the one thing people get wrong. And it is why people think peonies do not bloom. If they are buried too deep, they skip flowering every time. Once it is settled, year three, you get 30 flowers every May. Pink, white, coral, burgundy. Cut 10 for the kitchen. Leave 20 for the yard. Do not move it. Do not divide it. Peonies hate being moved and they will sulk for five years if you do. And then if you leave it alone, your great-grandchildren will cut flowers from the same plant in 2095. Seven plants. 20 years at the low end. Over a hundred at the high end. That century old peony at Longwood isn't the exception. It is what is possible if you pick the right plant and put it in the right hole. Plant yours now in the next two weeks while the soil is still cool and then mostly leave them alone. If this helped you, tell somebody, your neighbor, your kid, or the person who keeps buying annuals at the hardware store every May. The next video is on seven shade perennials. Nobody plants any more because they are old-fashioned. Those are the ones I want in my yard. See you then.