No need to plow a fortune into your plot.

Sharon Barkhymer uses words like thrifty and frugal to describe her penny-pinching gardening style, but other people call her just plain cheap.

"I'm not cheap," she protests. "I'm responsible."

Let's add smart to this list of adjectives. Seen a "hot new plant" catalog lately? You can spend $50 for a hosta - or you can fill your car with gas.

So the beleaguered Barkhymer's onto something: You don't have to spend your inheritance to have a beautiful garden. In that spirit, here are some ideas from local gardeners - all of them thrifty, responsible souls who occasionally veer into cheap - to help you plan your 2008 garden:

Barkhymer, who lives in North Coventry Township, Chester County, recognizes that "you can easily spend a fortune on annuals." So she does mostly serial perennials: peonies and irises to bloom in spring; yuccas, black-eyed Susans and coneflowers in summer; sedums like 'Autumn Joy' in late summer and fall.

She scouts out lesser-known, less-expensive plant nurseries in Lancaster County. She pots up 'Angel wing' begonia, basil, rosemary and bay leaf in fall, takes them indoors and reuses in spring. She saves seeds, cruises through Craigslist. And she propagates with cuttings: rhododendron and azalea in seed-starting mix and angel's trumpet in water.

"I can't believe people pay so much money for those," Barkhymer says of the pendulous trumpets that grow as annuals here. "I just lop off a branch and pop it in water."

She looks for plants that reseed - cleome, cosmos, bronze fennel - and participates in a perennial-plant swap with friends every spring. They load up on each other's irises, ground covers, poppies and small shrubs.

"I've gotten a lot of stuff I didn't have before, and it didn't cost me a cent," Barkhymer says.

Many of the swapped plants resulted from dividing, another reason to go the perennial route - and an easy way to economize.

Susan Dannenberg of Elkins Park is the kind of gardener who, were she not so kind, would shame us all. "Before you go out and buy anything," she says, "think about what kind of garden is suited to your area. Think of the long haul."

In other words, fashion a garden that's tended with well-made tools, enriched with organic compost and shredded-leaf mulch, and filled with native plants, such as phlox and maidenhair fern. Natives need less water, fertilizer, coddling and time.

"All of this pays off in the long run," she says.

Dannenberg also likes perennials like the underappreciated hosta, which grows easily, spreads nicely, has hundreds of varieties and usually costs far less than $50. And 'Sorbet' violas, which look like baby pansies. Despite faces no bigger than a quarter, and names like 'Blackberry cream' and "Lemon chiffon,' they're tough.

Ornamental grasses are Joe Blake's delight. The East Falls playwright and freelance editor has had great luck popping into Home Depot every week and scooping up tired-looking blue fescues and maiden grasses for a song.

"I get them for $2 or $3, and sometimes they just give them to me," says Blake, who theorizes that the impatiens-buying masses pass on grasses because "they look too difficult to take care of" - and the stores are happy to be rid of them.

Blake always checks the roots. "When the foliage starts to go bad up top, they discount deeply," he says of the big-boxes stores, "but most of the time, the roots are fine."

Linda R. Barry, master-gardener coordinator for Penn State Cooperative Extension in Delaware County, and her coworkers promote the use of water barrels to collect rain, and compost bins for household garbage. Both are sometimes given out free at workshops.

And "don't fill the whole planting area at one time," Barry suggests. "Plant the basics first."

Doris Stahl, who coordinates master gardeners for Penn State in Philadelphia, scans the shelves in Chinatown for inexpensive seed packets of Asian vegetables and winter squash. She trades seeds with friends, too.

"You don't have to plant the whole packet," she says, citing one of those "duh" gardening rules so often forgotten.

Stahl and others scour tag sales and flea markets for cheap, unusual alternatives to the costly containers sold by garden centers. You might find adaptable chamber pots and spittoons, baskets and cast-iron kettles, washtubs, children's wagons, Granite Ware cookware, colanders or, as Dannenberg once did, a soup ladle, which she filled with pansies and hung on the wall.

"It all depends on your aesthetic," says Stahl. "Just make sure whatever you get has - or you put in - drainage holes."

Despite winning a wagonload of ribbons and honors from the Philadelphia Flower Show, Art Wolk's aesthetic couldn't be more down to earth. A former librarian, he now makes his living as a gardening writer and speaker who likes to poke fun at our horticultural foibles. "Glorious Gardens for Pennies" is a favorite topic.

And he walks the walk. For years, Wolk grew 5,000 seedlings annually for customers and himself. He still grows seedlings for himself and forces bulbs big time in the cold frames and greenhouse at his Voorhees home.

Starting seeds indoors in winter is, hands down, the smartest penny-pinching trick - about one-fifth the cost of buying vegetable and flower seedlings, says Wolk.

And another thing: "I love annuals," he declares, knowing full well some plant snobs feel otherwise. In fact, he grows so many from seed, he can afford to plant wavy drifts throughout his garden.

You can toss some of those seeds right into the ground come Mother's Day (May 11) - marigolds, nasturtiums, tithonia, sunflowers and alyssum, lettuces, beans, parsley and cilantro.

Seriously now, besides the savings, growing from seed is "a bit of nature's magic," Wolk says. Not to be missed, if you can manage it.

Art Wolk, author of Gardening Lunacy: A Growing Concern (AAB Book Publishing, $23.95), will speak on "Glorious Gardens for Pennies" at Morris Arboretum from 7 to 9 p.m. March 18. Members: $25; nonmembers: $30. To register, call 215-247-5777, ext. 156 or 125.EndText

Penny-pinching gardeners are just like other gardeners; we just work harder to spend less. Here's a shortcut to more information, some of it free and all of it a good investment in your garden:

Rodale Institute's All-New Encyclopedia of Organic Gardening ($29). At 704 pages, worth its weight in compost. Go to www.rodale.com or www.organicgardening.com.

Burpee's The Complete Vegetable & Herb Gardener: A Guide to Growing Your Garden Organically by Karan Davis Cutler, Barbara W. Ellis and David Cavagnaro (Wiley, $39.95). Also The Complete Flower Gardener: The Comprehensive Guide to Growing Flowers Organically by Cutler and Ellis (Wiley, $34.95).

The National Gardening Association's Gardening All-in-One for Dummies (For Dummies, $29.99). Though they admit it only under duress, even A-plus gardeners sometimes consult this little tome.

Horticultural handbooks ($10) from Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, www.bbg.org/gar2.

The Well-Tended Perennial Garden by Tracy DiSabato-Aust (Timber Press, $23). Also The Perennial Gardener's Design Primer by Stephanie Cohen and Nancy J. Ondra (Storey, $24,95), both respected local horticulturists.

The Random House Book of Shrubs - and annuals, perennials, herbs and other plants, even if you have to buy used copies, because some are out of print. Garden author and champion seed-starter Art Wolk especially likes the one on vegetables by Roger Phillips. "It's one of those rare encyclopedic garden books that's fun to read," Wolk says, recalling a fascinating section on the Irish potato famine. Online cost is $20 new, a few dollars used.

Taylor Gardening Guides. They're all 400 pages, loaded with color photos and solid information, and only $23 each. Go to www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/taylors. Now that's a bargain.

University cooperative extensions are the ultimate bargains. See www.extension.psu.edu/Hort.html for Penn State and http://njaes.rutgers.edu/garden for Rutgers. We penny-pinching gardeners just can't resist free information. And we spell that S-M-A-R-T.

- Virginia A. Smith

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