Annuals may be all the rage in the spring, but from mid-summer to fall, shrubs and perennials are the king and queen. If you’ve noticed that your garden tends to get a little drab as the season progresses, these glorious selections will breathe life into your late-summer landscape!
A much-beloved ornamental grass, Karl Foerster is a workhorse in the late-season garden. Attractive clumps of strongly upright foliage give way to soft, wheat-like flower spikes that last through the rest of the year and peek through the winter snow. This late-summer perennial is awesome for low-maintenance landscapes and adds texture to your perennial borders.
There are entirely too many varieties of hosta to list here, in part because these shade-friendly perennials are true spring to late-summer standbys. While the lavender-coloured summer-blooming flowers are certainly a bonus, the foliage is the real draw. Leaves range in size from a few inches to a few feet wide, and come in colours and variegations from white to blue-green and chartreuse. Mix and match a few varieties to add long-lasting colour and dimension to the landscape.
Also known as plumbago, this spectacular perennial is fabulous for adding colour to the late-summer and fall landscape. Butterflies love the sky-blue flowers, which bloom profusely in pretty bunches. As versatile as it is attractive, leadwort works as a groundcover, container plant, or border plant and even tolerates clay soils.
A beauty in larger landscapes, it’s a joy to gaze over a mass planting of Russian dwarf sage in bloom. The lavender-blue flowers and purple calyxes look like hazy plumes floating in the landscape, and the scent of the foliage is a treat for the senses whenever a breeze passes through. This lovely late-summer perennial stays beautiful well into fall.
The late-summer garden is hardly complete without this stunning perennial! Autumn Joy’s gorgeous rose-coloured flowers and tough, attractive foliage flaunt their beauty from late-summer to late fall and even provide some winter interest. A great plant to have around through the dog days of summer, this sedum resists heat and drought while drawing pollinators from far and wide.
If you haven’t started a coneflower collection yet (after all, the colour range for these beauties is just stunning!), start with Wild Berry. It retains its colour longer than other varieties, so it’s an excellent bang-for-your-buck perennial in the late-summer garden. As with all coneflowers (and I do encourage you to plant more than one kind!), this one is a pollinator magnet.
Aside from the obvious tasty benefits of growing a blueberry shrub, they really are magnificent ornamentals. The white spring flowers and famous summer fruit are lovely, but the beautiful ovate foliage simply doesn’t get enough praise. As late-summer fades into autumn, many blueberries also develop stunning fall colours (like Pink Icing, which takes on shades of pink, blue, and green.) An excellent choice for sunny spots, provided the soil is on the acidic side.
Who doesn’t love a colour-changing flower? Little Lime’s flowerheads open in shades of soft mint green that gradually fade into eye-catching pink mixed with sage green in fall. This is such a unique shrub, and it’s no surprise why it’s been one of the most popular hydrangea varieties for several years now.
Still craving more colour for your landscape? Royal City Nursery is open through all four seasons, so visit us today to see what’s blooming in-store!
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