The biggest mistake people make when they create a garden is not designing it, said master gardener Lee Schneller Sligh.

  A haphazard collection of plants chosen with the best of intentions but little advanced planning rarely results in the perennial garden of your dreams, regardless of how many hours of hard labor go into the project.

  The good news is that designing a garden with reliable plants that will bloom from spring to fall is within reach, even for beginning gardeners.  And with snow and ice covering the garden plot and seed catalogues arriving daily, now is the perfect time to begin the planning process with Lee’s help.

  Lee, author of The Ever-Blooming Flower Garden, will talk at St. Andrews Village on February 12 at 2 p.m. The one-hour slide/talk will be an introduction to a simple and reliable technique she developed for designing continuously blooming perennial gardens. 

  Participants will see slides of gardens designed using this technique, first publicized in 2004 in an article in Fine Gardening magazine.  Over the years, Lee has designed and built more than 200 gardens and meticulously recorded the bloom times of hundreds of plants. She has also developed a list of about 200 reliable plants, and most importantly, developed a simple way of organizing the information that is necessary to develop a truly spectacular garden.

  “What I really wanted to do is just to help people to not get discouraged about perennial gardens,” she said.

  Since The Ever-Blooming Flower Garden was released by Storey Publishing in March 2009, the book has been continuously on the garden book bestseller list in independent bookstores nationwide and on Amazon.com.

  Lee started her gardening business, Lee Schneller Fine Gardens, in 1995 in midcoast Maine.  She has also lived extensively in Asia and specializes in Japanese-inspired, naturalistic and continuously blooming gardens.  In addition to garden design, Lee frequently gives talks on Japanese garden design and history, and on continuously blooming garden design. 

  To learn more, see her website at www.LeeSchneller.com.This presentation is free but space is limited, please RSVP by calling Laury Dalton at 633-0920. St. Andrews is located on Emery Lane in Boothbay Harbor just south of the Boothby Region High School in Boothbay Harbor.