SenecaHill.com
Title
Welcome to Seneca Hill Perennials
Description
Seneca Hill Perennials is a small mail-order nursery located in snowy upstate New York, just south of the great metropolis of Oswego. We specialize to some extent in hardy cyclamen, species peonies, hardy aroids, and hardy plants of the Drakensberg of southern Africa; beyond that, we grow what we feel like growing, and that is definitely a moving target. We try not to be seduced into craving “new and different” plants solely for their newness and differentness, reminding ourselves that anything we have not grown is, indeed, new and different to us.
And that’s why, in our catalog, you’ll find a mix of new and old, tried-and-true and experimental. You’ll find classic plants: cyclamen, glaucidiums, selected Primula sieboldii, heirloom irises, gentians and the like. You’ll find arums and arisaemas, species peonies, hardy South Africans (dieramas, eucomis, kniphofias and more), milkweeds, and bits of this and that. You’ll find increasing numbers of US native plants, not because we’ve gotten religion, but because a lot of them are passed over by gardeners but should not be. You’ll find a few things that are there only because we think they might be worth growing (but haven’t yet tried them ourselves). We hope that you’ll free yourself from the fetters of plant prejudice and, if you’ve never grown something, consider growing it now, even if everyone else already does.
We can repeat this rant until we’re blue in the face: hardiness zones do not tell you most of what you need to know about growing conditions. Pick up a USDA zone map and study it. Syracuse, New York and Omaha, Nebraska, are both in zone 5. Do you really think their growing conditions are similar? Of course not. The totality of the growing climate, not just the winter low temperature, affects the plant’s performance. Snow cover, soil type, presence of pathogens and predators, patterns of temperature change, patterns and amounts of rainfall, drainage, and other things all matter. Is there any simple way to summarize the growing conditions of either place? No. A good gardener experiments. A good gardener kills a lot of plants. A good gardener is not literal-minded about hardiness zones, either way.
