Picking the right perennials can feel like a guessing game—especially when everything at the nursery looks so tempting. I’ve definitely fallen for a few “must-have” plants that ended up being total divas in my garden.
Some needed constant pampering, while others looked great for a week and then disappeared. A few even invited pests to the party! After years, I’ve learned which ones just aren’t worth the trouble. This summer, skip the letdowns and go for plants that actually earn their keep.
Here are some overrated picks to avoid—and the reliable alternatives that have truly delivered in my garden.
1. Russian Sage: Pretty But Problematic
Despite its silvery foliage and purple blooms, Russian sage quickly becomes a garden bully. After establishing, it spreads aggressively through underground runners, popping up in unwanted places and crowding out neighboring plants.
The woody stems become brittle and unsightly as they age, requiring frequent cutting back. Many gardeners find themselves constantly battling to keep it contained rather than enjoying its beauty.
While drought-tolerant, this plant often flops over in rich soil or after rain, creating a messy appearance that requires staking or supports to manage properly.
2. Daylilies: One-Day Wonders
The common orange daylily (Hemerocallis fulva) might seem like a low-maintenance choice, but it’s actually quite invasive in many regions. Its aggressive nature means you’ll spend more time removing unwanted plants than admiring flowers.
True to their name, each bloom lasts just a single day before withering. This means constant deadheading to keep the plant looking tidy, adding hours of maintenance to your garden chores during summer months.
The foliage often becomes unsightly by mid-summer, turning yellow and brown at the edges even with proper care. For all the space they take up, the actual flowering show is surprisingly brief.
3. Delphinium: High Maintenance Heartbreaker
Gardening catalogs showcase delphiniums as towering spires of blue perfection, but the reality is far less impressive. These plants demand perfect conditions—rich soil, consistent moisture, and protection from wind and heat—requirements most gardens simply can’t provide.
Their tall stems frequently snap in summer storms, leaving you with broken stalks instead of beautiful blooms. Even when staked properly, a single heavy rain can destroy weeks of anticipation.
Most varieties are short-lived perennials at best, often behaving more like annuals in many climate zones. After spending considerable effort nurturing them, you’ll likely need to replace them every few years anyway.
4. Foxglove: Fleeting Beauty With Drawbacks
Many gardeners are drawn to foxglove’s dramatic spires, only to discover they’re technically biennials, not true perennials. After flowering in their second year, most foxgloves die completely, leaving unexpected gaps in your carefully planned garden design.
Every part of this plant is highly toxic, making it a risky choice for gardens where children or pets play. The dramatic bell-shaped flowers may not be worth the constant vigilance required.
Foxgloves self-seed enthusiastically, appearing in random spots throughout your garden. While this might sound beneficial, the volunteer seedlings rarely match the quality of the parent plants and often create a weedy, unplanned look.
5. Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’: Floppy And Frustrating
The massive white blooms of ‘Annabelle’ hydrangea look spectacular in nursery photos but cause endless frustration in real gardens. After the first good rain, those dinner-plate-sized flowers become so heavy they pull the entire plant to the ground.
Even with elaborate staking systems, keeping these plants upright through summer storms proves nearly impossible. The fallen stems create a messy appearance that contradicts the elegant look most gardeners are trying to achieve.
The flowers quickly turn an unattractive greenish-brown that persists for weeks before they can be pruned away. For all their initial beauty, ‘Annabelle’ hydrangeas spend most of the season looking disheveled rather than distinguished.
6. Hollyhocks: Disease Magnets
Hollyhocks evoke cottage garden charm, but their susceptibility to rust disease makes them a maintenance nightmare. The orange-brown fungal spots appear on lower leaves first, then rapidly spread upward, turning the entire plant unsightly by mid-summer.
Treating rust requires vigilant fungicide application starting early in the season and continuing regularly. Most gardeners find themselves fighting a losing battle against this persistent problem year after year.
Like foxgloves, many hollyhock varieties are actually short-lived perennials or biennials rather than true perennials. After investing time combating disease issues, you’ll likely need to replant them anyway, creating an endless cycle of work with minimal reward.
7. Lupines: Short-Lived Showstoppers
Garden centers sell lupines as perennials, but in most regions, they’re frustratingly short-lived. After putting on a spectacular spring show in their first year, they frequently decline or disappear entirely by the following season.
Lupines demand very specific growing conditions—cool temperatures and acidic, well-drained soil. Deviate even slightly from these requirements, and they’ll reward your efforts with a quick death, leaving unexpected holes in your garden design.
Their susceptibility to aphids means you’ll spend weeks watching these pests colonize the plants, distorting new growth and diminishing flower quality. The brief beauty rarely justifies the specialized care and inevitable disappointment they deliver.
8. Bleeding Heart: Here Today, Gone Tomorrow
The classic bleeding heart (Dicentra spectabilis) charms gardeners with its unique heart-shaped spring flowers, but its disappearing act leaves much to be desired. By early summer, when the garden should be hitting its stride, this plant goes completely dormant, leaving an empty space where your showpiece once stood.
Planning around this seasonal gap becomes an annual challenge. Whatever you plant to fill the void must accommodate the bleeding heart’s return the following spring, severely limiting your design options.
During its brief performance, bleeding heart demands consistent moisture. A few days of drought stress can accelerate its dormancy period, cutting short an already limited show and leaving you with nothing but memories until next year.
9. Lily Of The Valley: Invasive Nightmare
The sweet fragrance of lily of the valley masks its aggressive nature. What starts as a charming spring accent quickly becomes a garden thug that’s nearly impossible to eradicate once established.
Underground rhizomes spread relentlessly, popping up in lawns, under shrubs, and even through cracks in pavement. Removing them requires digging up large sections of garden and meticulously sorting through soil to extract every fragment of root—miss even one piece, and the invasion continues.
Every part of this plant is highly toxic, presenting serious risks to children, pets, and wildlife attracted by the bright red berries that follow the flowers. The brief spring bloom hardly justifies the year-round management challenges it creates.
10. Columbine: Self-Seeding Menace
Columbines start as delightful spring bloomers but quickly reveal their problematic nature through aggressive self-seeding. Within a few seasons, seedlings appear everywhere—in pathways, among other perennials, and even in lawn edges.
The offspring rarely resemble their parents, typically reverting to less attractive forms with muddied colors. The original plants you carefully selected gradually disappear, replaced by a mishmash of inferior volunteers that create a chaotic, unplanned look.
Adding to the frustration, columbines are magnets for leaf miners that create unsightly white tunnels throughout the foliage. By mid-summer, the once-attractive leaves look diseased and damaged, detracting from nearby plants that are still performing well.
11. Astilbe: Water-Hungry Prima Donna
Garden centers position astilbes as problem-solvers for shade gardens, but they’re actually high-maintenance moisture hogs. Their water requirements exceed what most gardens can reasonably provide without supplemental irrigation.
During inevitable summer dry spells, astilbes quickly develop crispy, brown leaf edges that no amount of emergency watering can reverse. Once damaged, the foliage remains unsightly for the remainder of the growing season.
Their brief flowering period lasts just 2-3 weeks, leaving you with ordinary-looking foliage that demands extraordinary care for the remaining months. The fleeting display hardly justifies the constant attention and water resources they consume throughout the growing season.
12. Balloon Flower: Brittle Disappointment
Balloon flowers (Platycodon) emerge late in spring, creating anxiety for gardeners who can’t remember what was planted where. Their brittle stems snap easily when brushed against or during routine garden maintenance, ruining the display before it even begins.
The balloon-shaped buds that give this plant its name are actually more interesting than the open flowers, which quickly fade and require constant deadheading. The brief period when buds are present hardly justifies the space they occupy.
Despite being marketed as low-maintenance, balloon flowers frequently need staking to prevent them from splaying open after rain. Their relatively short bloom period and ordinary foliage make them unremarkable garden performers that take up valuable real estate.
13. Butterfly Bush: Invasive Beauty
Butterfly bush (Buddleia) attracts pollinators but creates significant ecological problems. In many regions, it’s classified as invasive, escaping gardens and displacing native plants that provide better habitat for wildlife.
Despite its name, butterfly bush offers little benefit to butterflies beyond nectar. It doesn’t serve as a host plant for caterpillars, making it far less valuable for butterfly conservation than native alternatives that support the complete lifecycle.
The woody growth becomes increasingly ungainly over time, developing a messy structure that requires aggressive annual pruning to maintain any semblance of attractiveness. After a few years, most specimens look more like awkward shrubs than the graceful flowering plants initially purchased.
14. Catmint ‘Six Hills Giant’: Sprawling Space Hog
Catmint ‘Six Hills Giant’ starts the season looking neat and compact but quickly becomes a sprawling mess that overwhelms neighboring plants. Its aggressive growth habit means it regularly needs cutting back, creating periods where your garden has a half-bald spot.
After the first impressive bloom, subsequent flowerings are notably less spectacular, with fewer blooms and a more untidy appearance. The plant spends most of the season looking either overgrown or freshly hacked back.
The foliage becomes increasingly ratty as summer progresses, with older leaves turning yellow and creating an unkempt appearance. For the amount of space it demands, this catmint variety delivers diminishing returns through the growing season.
15. Coneflower ‘Double Delight’: Unstable Showoff
Fancy double coneflowers like ‘Double Delight’ command premium prices at nurseries but rarely maintain their showy forms over time. After a season or two, many plants revert to single-flowered forms that bear little resemblance to what you originally purchased.
These highly bred varieties lack the durability of their wild ancestors. They’re more susceptible to disease, particularly aster yellows, which causes bizarre green growths to replace normal flowers and eventually kills the entire plant.
Even when healthy, double coneflowers produce fewer seeds than single varieties, significantly reducing their wildlife value. Birds that would normally feast on traditional coneflower seeds find little nutrition from these showy but functionally compromised varieties.
16. Lavender: Perfect Alternative For Sunny Spots
English lavender thrives in the challenging conditions that cause other perennials to fail. Its silver-gray foliage remains attractive even when not in bloom and stands up beautifully to heat and drought once established.
Unlike many flowering perennials, lavender asks little from gardeners beyond good drainage and occasional pruning. No deadheading is required, and the plant actually performs better with benign neglect than with fussy attention.
Beyond its visual appeal, lavender offers practical benefits through its calming fragrance and ability to attract beneficial pollinators while deterring deer and rabbits. Harvest stems for drying, and you’ll enjoy its benefits indoors long after the garden season ends.
17. Baptisia: Trouble-Free Native Option
False indigo (Baptisia) offers the vertical interest of delphiniums without any of the maintenance headaches. Its deep root system makes it remarkably drought-tolerant once established, eliminating the need for supplemental watering even during dry spells.
The blue-green foliage forms an attractive bush that maintains its shape all season without staking or support. After spring flowering, decorative seed pods develop that add textural interest through fall and winter.
As a native plant, baptisia supports local pollinators and fits seamlessly into the ecosystem. Its long lifespan means you’ll plant it once and enjoy it for decades—a truly sustainable choice that improves with age rather than declining like many high-maintenance alternatives.
18. Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’: Reliable Four-Season Interest
Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ delivers multiple seasons of changing interest from a single planting. The succulent foliage emerges in spring, providing months of attractive texture before flower buds even appear.
Summer brings clusters of pale pink blooms that deepen to rusty red as fall approaches. Unlike many perennials that need cutting back after flowering, these seed heads provide winter interest and food for birds when left standing.
This plant’s drought tolerance is legendary—established plants rarely need supplemental water even during extended dry periods. Its resistance to pests and diseases means you’ll spend time enjoying this plant rather than treating problems, making it ideal for low-maintenance gardens.
19. Geranium ‘Rozanne’: Non-Stop Flowering Machine
Hardy geranium ‘Rozanne’ solves the short-bloom problem that plagues many perennials. Instead of a brief flowering period, it produces violet-blue blooms continuously from late spring until frost, providing months of reliable color.
The mounding habit fills spaces beautifully without becoming invasive or requiring division every few years. Its natural tendency to weave between neighboring plants creates a cohesive garden design with minimal effort.
Heat, humidity, and drought rarely faze this sturdy performer. While other perennials look tired by August, ‘Rozanne’ maintains fresh foliage and abundant flowers through the challenging late summer period when many gardens lose their appeal.
20. Heuchera: Colorful Shade Solution
Modern heuchera varieties solve the challenge of bringing color to shade gardens without relying on flowers. Their foliage comes in an astonishing range of colors—from caramel and purple to silver and lime—providing visual interest from spring through fall.
Unlike hostas that become slug buffets, heucheras generally resist these pests, maintaining attractive leaves throughout the season. Their compact size makes them perfect for smaller gardens or as front-of-border accents in larger landscapes.
Most varieties perform equally well in containers as in the ground, offering versatility that many perennials lack. Their evergreen or semi-evergreen nature in many climates means they provide garden structure even during winter months when other perennials have disappeared.