Almost everyone can identify traditional garden plant favorites such as the bearded iris, herbaceous peony, and rose. But, when such common plants remain blithely bloomless or produce the wrong flowers, new gardeners may despair of ever being able to grow anything.

If those classic beauties seem to you to be as finicky as they are famed, just keep in mind that some of these plants prefer to be shallow planted .

Take showy bearded irises such as ‘Beverly Sills’ and ‘Immortality,’ for example. Keep in mind that you don’t want to plant iris rhizomes as deeply...Read more