These seldom asked questions should top your list of gardening inquiries

I’m hoping these will be useful pieces of information.

They’re heartfelt messages from the mind of a teacher. Yep – I taught high school horticulture for two years, and I guess you might say I’ve been teaching in one form or another ever since.

In almost 50 years of helping Texas gardeners, I figure I’ve answered somewhere near 450,000 phone calls on my radio programs and mailbag questions to newspaper columns.

These are some of the least asked, but most important inquiries among them.

“If you were choosing just one shade tree for your front yard, what would it be? Please go ahead and list two more just to give my spouse a choice.”

You asked for my own personal opinion, and for all of my life I’ve said that I would like to have a Shumard red oak at the head of my grave. I don’t believe there is any prettier shade tree in Texas. They’re adapted to all kinds of soils, including the alkaline black clay gumbos in and around the Metroplex. Shumard red oaks grow to be 40 to 50 feet tall and wide. They’re dark green all summer, turning showy colors of red, orange, yellow and especially bronze in late fall.

As for my additional choices, next would be Chinquapin oaks, then bur oaks, then, if space permitted, live oaks. All of these trees are widely adapted, and each can live to be 150 to 200 years old and older.

“What is the productive life expectancy of a planting of shrubs when they’re set out into a new landscape? In other words, will I need to plan to replace them at some point?”

This is such a great gardening question, I do wish that people would consider it. Too often folks figure that shrubs, once planted, are going to outlive the sequoias. What happens, however, is that we start pruning and shaping the shrubs and each one of those trims takes a little of their vigor away. Eventually you’ll notice that their bottoms are bare and there’s just a sparse layer of new growth across the tops of the plants. That’s accelerated when shade trees grow larger and the shrubs no longer get the light that they need. That’s when it’s time to plan for a landscaping remodel.

As for how long that’s likely to be? My wife and I have lived in our home for 43 years. Some of my shrub beds have been redone now for the third time. I get to a point where I’m not happy with their appearance and I realize that I really need to make a change – that the trend is for the worse. It gives me a chance to widen the beds, try new plants, perhaps types that are better suited to shade, and maybe work in a more modern style of landscaping in the process. So that’s all a great thing.

“How much work and money would I save if I used perennial flowers instead of annual flowers?”

Let me address the issue of “work” first. Many folks think that they can plant perennials once and forget about them – let them grow year after year without much care and attention. Well, I hate to ruin that dream, but it really doesn’t turn out that way. When you have a bed of annual flowers you can use a rototiller to prepare the soil. You incorporate several inches of sphagnum peat moss, compost, shredded pine bark mulch, rotted manure and expanded shale to condition the soil down to a depth of 8 or 10 inches. By using a rear-tine tiller (tines behind the wheels) you can pulverize the ground to the consistency of potting soil. And then, six months later, when you change out the annuals to the next crop, you can rework the soil in a modified form of the same process.

With perennials you get to do all of that one time. That’s before you plant them initially, because once they’re planted and growing you have to rework the bed by hand. Perennials that bloom in the spring are dug and divided in the fall, and plants that bloom in the fall are divided in spring. You never get the chance to do it all at the same time again. So your workload is actually much greater. Plus, you’re having to schedule perennials that bloom month after month since any given species is only colorful, with rare exceptions, for a few weeks.

As for the difference in cost, perennials might win on that one. But that isn’t as big a victory as one might think when you consider all the extra work that we’ve just described.

“Are native plants really better?”

Oh, how I wish people would ask that question. I get it from the other side – too many people are insistent that they only want to use native plants. It’s far more important that a plant be adapted. Not all plants that are native to the big state of Texas are going to be happy growing in your area’s soils and climate. They may come from a region with far different soils, or where rainfall is greater or less or where winters aren’t as cold. My best advice here: ask plenty of questions of a Texas Certified Nursery Professional before you plunk your bucks down on the counter.

You can hear Neil Sperry on KLIF 570AM on Saturday afternoons 1-3 pm and on WBAP 820AM Sunday mornings 8-10 am. Join him at www.neilsperry.com and follow him on Facebook.