The Designer's Muse: The 10 best plants for your late summer garden

Wednesday, August 10, 2016

The 10 best plants for your late summer garden

It's not always easy to keep your garden looking fantastic and colorful during the late summer. Many of the earlier perennials have finished blooming and their foliage is beginning to look spent and bedraggled. I like a garden which looks great all year round, so here are my recommendations for the 10 best plants you can add to your garden to keep it looking beautiful all summer long.

#1 Hydrangeas come in many varieties and colors. The blooms are long lasting and they are generally very easy to care for.

Photograph by Stacy Bass

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#2 Rose of Sharon, in my opinion, is underrated and underused in the modern garden. I like that they bloom and look fresh during the hottest part of the summer when many other plants are looking worn out from the hot summer sun.

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#3 Russian Sage is a great, sun loving, drought resistant perennial that looks great in mass or with other plants in a perennial garden.

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Ina Garten's garden

Beatrix Ferrand society

#4 Butterfly Bushes are great looking but also attract butterflies and humming birds. In my garden they tend to self seed and show up in almost any open space...filling in gaps in my garden.

Potters Road Nursery

#5 Phlox come in such great colors and are easy to grow. They add life to a late summer garden. The only problem is that the deer love them as much as I do. I have a very hard time keeping the buds from getting munched on before they have a chance to bloom.

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#6 Liatris are a super easy plant to have. They are bulbs...plant them and forget them. They look great in bunches next to blue hydrangeas.

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Longfield Gardens

#7 Echinacea is another easy care plant for the late summer garden.

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#8 Lambs Ears foliage has a silvery soft texture which looks great all summer long. These are a great contrast against greener foliage and colorful blooms. I don't care very much for the flowers on the lambs ears, so I tend to cut them off.

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Photo by Clive Nichols

Wohnen und Garten

#9 Dahlias add a riot of color to a summer garden and will continue blooming until first frost. In New England, however they are not perennial and must be dug up in the fall and replanted in the spring.

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Heiress Flowers

Garden of Eaden

#10 Clethra Summer Sweet is another underrated and underused plant which is perfect for the late summer garden. The aroma of a summer sweet in full bloom is absolutely intoxicating. There is a place in my town where they grow wild at the edge of a boggy woody area; the scent is just heavenly.