[Fiddledidee]

Tell me about your gardens and landscaping. What are your favored hedges, bushes, vines, flowering perennials, seasonal color?

We will have to say goodbye to our colorful, tropical plants if/when we move north. I'm hoping I can at least still have a variety of colors from which to adorn our new home.

[tkln]

You can't beat lilac season, in terms of the sheer volume of lilacs up here and how good they smell. It only lasts a few weeks but so worth it.

Some of my favorites:
lupines everywhere...even on the road
my flowering thyme which is all over our patio and the bees love it
Peonies...
all kinds of daylilies, regular lilies, tall phlox, black eyed susans....
SUNFLOWERS!

And of course, for the best variety of colors....foliage season.

[arctichomesteader]

Apple tree blossoms have few rivals. Cherries may come close (I have those as well as plums, pears, and serviceberry trees). I have a lot of wild plants around my place being that it's in the woods. Some of my favorites are the trilliums, lady slippers, and fireweed. Roses, tulips, lilacs, daisies, asters and many more flowers will grow here. You might be surprised but the cucumber magnolia will grow in parts of Vermont with a good site, as will a couple varieties of peach. I've got grape vines at my place (wild and domesticated varieties). Maples, sumac, and some others will have some great fall foliage colors. Then there's evergreens for winter like cedar, spruce, fir, hemlock, pines, etc.

[tkln]

Yes, believe it or not, we have a giant magnolia at our house that the previous owners planted. Not sure what species, reminds me of the ones that were everywhere in NYC. We also have a Japanese maple. Definitely not the norm, from what I know anyway lol.

The real wildflowers as arctichomesteader mentions are indeed amazing - going on a hike and spotting them is a real treat.

[Fiddledidee]

Thanks for these. I'll start researching.

[ansible90]

When you go to a garden center up here, look for perennial plants and shrubs that have been grown by New England or Canadian growers. Be careful to read labels because you will often see "perennials" for zone 5 or further south, which will not last the winter here.

Something you might not be used to is most of the flowering plants disappear for the winter -- the leaves go brown and you have to cut them down in the fall. But they grow again in the spring. Deciduous trees and bushes lose their leaves in fall (then it is stick season until they start up again in the spring). I like having some fir and pine trees and bushes so I can see some green in the winter.

There are plenty of beautiful flowers up here. I have a trumpet vine in my front courtyard that attracts hummingbirds. Until I moved here, I had no idea hummingbirds came this far north.

I also have a lot of indoor plants. What you get will depend on the amount of sunlight in your house. You might look at some of your southern outdoor plants with an eye towards growing them inside in pots. Bring some with you when you move up here.

[arctichomesteader]

There us a fair amount of zone 5 here but it's highly variable. Don't go by the USDA zone map alone. It can show zone 5 on a mountain that is really a 4 or even a 3. It shows my place as a 4 in the northeast kingdom but it's not so simple. It's close to a zone 3 but I have some micro-climate effects that keep a small portion warmer than the surrounding area. I have a reliance peach tree that survived 30 below up there. My guess is 1,000 feet down the hill or up the hill and it would have been dead.