Extending Summer Color into Fall
By Chris Edmunds
Plant these perennials for bright colorful fall blooms!
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Having consistent color in your garden from spring to fall can be tricky when you’re planting perennials. Oftentimes they only bloom for one season, so you need to plant a mix of different varieties that bloom in succession. However, there are a few perennials with long blooming periods that stretch from late spring or summer into fall.
Get Amazing Garden Blooms from Spring to Fall
Don’t want to go to the effort of creating a planting calendar to make sure your garden is always blooming? Here’s a much simpler solution. Your garden will never be short on color if you plant these long-lasting perennials:
Catmint
Not to be confused with catnip, this flowering mint has tall, purple flower spikes that emerge in late spring and last until early fall. Its foliage has a lovely muted, grey-green color, making it perfect for gardens with cool-toned color schemes. Catmint works well in borders and property edging because of its dense, lush growing habit. Harvest its leaves and flowers to brew into fragrant herbal teas—it has natural anti-anxiety effects!
Salvia
These icy blue and purple flowers bloom all summer long, but if you cut the spent flowers, it will encourage the plant to continue reblooming into fall! Aside from the regular deadheading of flowers, salvia is an incredibly low-maintenance plant, and it’s highly drought-tolerant. Plant it in full sun to get the best results, and use it as a border plant at the back of your garden—salvia can reach anywhere from 2–5 feet tall, depending on your chosen variety.
Yarrow
Delicate, cloud-like clusters of tiny flowers bloom from June to September on the perennial yarrow plant. It has a centuries-long history of medicinal use, but nowadays, it’s mainly prized for its long-lasting flowers. They’re usually white, but you can also find bright red, pink, yellow, or rust-colored varieties. Plant it in full sun, and deadhead the spent blooms to prolong the blooming period through fall.
Ice Plant
There are so many eye-catching elements to this distinctive perennial succulent that blooms from June to September. Its bright magenta petals are small, but high in number, creating a textured fringe effect around each yellow center. It gets the name “Ice Plant” from the frosty, metallic sheen it has across its flowers and foliage, glinting when it catches the light. This plant stays low to the ground, around 3–6 inches high, making it a great ground cover.
Coneflower
Also known as echinacea, this bright and cheerful perennial bloom is both cute and powerful! It has long been used as a natural remedy for cough and cold symptoms. Pollinators like bees and butterflies love echinacea too—the big, bulbous centers are easy for them to access to get that sweet flower nectar! This flower comes in almost every color under the sun, with some amazing multicolored varieties like “Green Envy” that look like they were tie-dyed!
Tickseed
Right when June comes to an end and our early spring flowers have all faded, tickseed never fails to light up our gardens with its sunny golden blooms. Many will last well into October if you cut them back after their first summer bloom. Tickseed is native to the United States, so it’s perfectly adapted to thrive in our climate. While most tickseed flowers are warm gold in color, we love the varieties with a splash of burgundy in the center—the perfect autumn shades to compliment the changing tree foliage!
Lavender
How could you not love the calming scent of fresh lavender wafting on the breeze? Adding lavender to your landscape is sure to delight the senses—you can even use it for culinary purposes, like lavender-infused simple syrups for cocktails. It’s smart to harvest the flowers regularly, as this encourages these perennial flowers to keep on blooming until the temperatures start to dip. Plant it in full sun with well-draining soil, and when you cut it back, make sure you don’t cut into the thick, woody parts of the stem.
Reblooming Daylily
We’re always so amazed at how resilient these elegant perennial flowers truly are. Daylilies are drought-tolerant, pest and disease-resistant, low-maintenance, and are totally unfazed by traffic pollution. This makes them great for gardens in big cities! Not all daylilies will rebloom continuously, so we recommend choosing varieties like “Stella de Oro” or “Charles Johnston” and cutting back the spent blooms so you can get another wave of color.
Kaw Valley has plenty of new perennials this year, ready to be planted for some late-season color to enjoy all through fall. Visit us soon to see the entire collection!
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