As the weather warms up, your spring plantings might be looking a little tired. Give your garden a summertime refresh with flowering plants that add bold color and lush foliage. These easy-to-grow perennials love the heat, attract pollinators, and will brighten up your beds and containers all the way until fall. Add them to your garden now and enjoy bunches of blooms in the months to come.
Salvia
These tall, flower-covered spikes add dramatic height to your garden beds and bloom until early fall. They can tolerate dry conditions well and do best in full sun. They come in shades of purple, indigo, lavender, pink, red, and white; the bright colors are a magnet for pollinators, especially bees.
Milkweed
Monarch butterflies use these colorful and fragrant native plants as a food source and a rare place to lay eggs. Most varieties of milkweed have small star-shaped flowers in colors ranging from green to deep pink. They typically bloom until August or September and have seed pods that split open in the fall to sow more plants.
Before you plant milkweed, make sure you are planting one that is native to your area. Swamp or pink milkweed (Asclepias incarnata) and showy milkweed (Asclepias speciosa) are two that are widely native in the United States. Your local cooperative extension service can recommend others.
Zinnias
Candy-colored zinnias are a cheerful (and prolific) addition to summer beds and containers, especially if you like cutting flowers for arrangements. Plant them in June for a steady supply of blooms until fall.
Yarrow
This hardy native plant adds a meadow-like look to your landscape with its tight clusters of tiny blooms in warm sunset shades of orange and yellow, as well as white. Yarrow requires little more than lots of sunshine and well-drained soil and will bloom until the weather turns cool.
Asters
Give your summer garden a major boost of color with this late-summer showstopper. Asters have masses of vibrant blooms until early fall and are easy to maintain. There are hundreds of varieties to choose from, including daisy-like plants and bushy sprays with smaller blooms.
Bee Balm
This old-fashioned plant makes a lovely addition to beds and cutting gardens. Bee balm flowers are unusually shaped, with thin, ruffled petals that come in bold, saturated shades. True to its name, it’s ideal for attracting pollinators and typically grows through the end of summer, with some varieties lasting into the fall.
Coreopsis
Also known as “Tickseed,” this easygoing, drought-resistant plant thrives even in the height of summer. Most varieties bear flowers in sunny shades of yellow, orange, and gold, but there are also plants with bicolored, pink, and red blooms.
Sedum
There are many types of this succulent, but almost all of them are tough, drought-tolerant plants that bloom until early- to mid-fall. Creeping sedums are used as a colorful ground cover or to fill containers, and taller varieties work well in garden beds with other summertime bloomers.
Helenium
This native plant’s other name—“Sneezeweed”—might turn you off immediately, but it’s actually a lovely mid- to late-summer bloomer. While some varieties look similar in shape and size to coneflowers, others have flat flower heads with striking bicolored petals.
Cosmos
A cottage garden favorite, delicate cosmos will flower all summer long and require very little care. Pink, magenta, and white varieties are the most common types available in garden stores, but the plant comes in many other colors, including coral, yellow, and chocolate brown.
