Really Late Bloomers
 White Flower Farm Photos |
(1/8/2008) I had an epiphany last week. It would take only a little thought to design a garden of perennials that flower for four to six months! What a gift.
Back in the summer of 1996, when I worked at the Bayberry in Amagansett, customers asked for perennials that flowered all summer, and they wouldn’t accept it when I said there weren’t any. We were delighted with perennials that bloomed for a month.
We’ve come a long way since then. In just a few minutes I came up with more than 15.
Daylily Stella D’Oro, which gives waves of chromium-gold flowers from June to October, was perhaps the first nonstop bloomer to become wildly popular. It flew out the doors of garden centers by the thousands. It didn’t take long for a prettier, canary-yellow cultivar, Happy Returns, to be introduced. They have been joined by numerous others in a wide range of colors that flower for about four months.
More recently the Knockout roses also created terrific buzz, flowering for as long as six months, from spring through a hard frost. They look just as good in late October as they do in June. Lots of color and no diseases. Knockouts are seducing people into giving roses a second chance in home gardens.
On the East End we’ve been growing a prolific-flowering blue geranium, Rozanne, for about five years. It is sensational. The color appeals to everyone, gardener or not, and it must be the most popular perennial in the garden centers. If you didn’t know, you would be excused for thinking it an annual: Rozanne doesn’t stop flowering for six months. One day in November, as I was driving into LongHouse, I involuntarily snapped, “Enough already!”
Rozanne is no stranger to the East End, but the Perennial Plant Association has named it the Plant of the Year 2008.
Rozanne has been joined by another blue geranium, Honey Bee; this year keep your eyes open for a pink, Pink Penny. Both are supposed to be equally prolific and long-flowering.
Jim Glover of the wholesale Glover Perennials in Cutchogue gave me a rundown of his favorites. After Rozanne, he mentioned agastaches, which are not as familiar to gardeners as they ought to be. Normally they are wonderful late-summer (August and September) bloomers that perk up the garden and extend its season. They attract hummingbirds and butterflies, are deer-resistant and drought-tolerant. All this and the foliage has an anise fragrance. Why haven’t they become more popular?
 Rozane, or flowering geranium, has deep-purple blossoms for six months. |
Recently new cultivars have been introduced that flower from June or July until a hard frost. The flower spikes are vivid blue (Black Adder), smoky violet-blue (Blue Fortune), and purple (Purple Haze). Most agastaches require well-drained soil and full sun. They are terrific in gravel gardens as well as containers, borders, and meadows. One of my favorites that I saw at Chanticleer in Pennsylvania last summer is Agastache rupestris. It has apricot-orange flowers with narrow silver leaves on a two-foot plant.
Mr. Glover loves calaminta and nepeta (catmint). They too are deer-resistant, have fragrant foliage, are drought-tolerant, and want full sun and good drainage. Both attract butterflies and the calaminta, hummingbirds.
Mr. Glover and I agree that Calaminta nepeta ssp. nepeta is the best of the group. It is covered with airy flowers for at least five months. To me the flowers appear white, but others say they have a light-blue cast. What a shame the calaminta doesn’t have a short, snappy name.
Nepeta Walker’s Low (Plant of the Year 2007) and N. Dropmore are top performers, flowering prolifically up to six months. There is a reason these plants are so popular: delicious fragrance, soft and hazy blue and lavender flower spikes with silver foliage. They guarantee romance in the garden.
I’m always tempted to cut the calaminta and nepeta back after the first blooms are finished to encourage new growth, but Mr. Glover said it isn’t necessary; he doesn’t touch them the entire season and they continue to flower. They are lovely to look at and tough as nails.
 Hemerocallis Red Hot Returns, an ever-blooming day lily, has large, showy flowers up to five inches across. |
Boltonia is an end-of-summer native plant with masses of small lavender or white daisy-like flowers. I must have grown it for five years and it performed as it should have only once. More often than not the long stalks fell over, looking sloppy. You can bet it ended up in the compost pile.
Mr. Glover says there is a new, more compact form, named Jim Crockett for the original host of “The Victory Garden.” It has lavender-blue flowers with a yellow center, is only 18 inches high and needs no staking, begins flowering in July and doesn’t stop until a hard frost.
A white, daisy-like perennial has recently been introduced that he said is a good performer: Kalimeris integrifolia. It forms a compact, two-foot mound that begins flowering in June and goes on for four months. Boltonia and kalimeris look very much like asters, which everyone loves but not everyone can grow well. Summer heat and humidity take their toll on asters. Boltonia and kalimeris are great alternatives.
I was speechless when Mr. Glover went into ecstasies over a tradescantia! “No, no, it has none of the bad, weedy qualities of tradescantia,” he said. For a mild-mannered man, his adjectives — glowing gold foliage, large deep-blue flowers, exceptionally long-blooming, incredible performer — made me begin looking for a spot in my garden with morning sun. Mr. Glover calls it Tradescantia Blue & Gold, but I believe it also is called Sweet Kate. It begins in May and continues into October.
I’m not normally a fan of coreopsis. Two years ago a plant breeder, Dan Heims of Terra Nova Nurseries in Canby, Ore., sent me a plant to trial; I planted it and forgot about it. Last June I gradually became aware of a plant covered with flowers at the front of my sunny garden. The petals were ivory with a circle of deep maroon around a golden eye.
Called Autumn Blush, it was still flowering in October. It may have been the most asked-about of all the plants in the garden last summer. It is more compact than the traditional gold standard of coreopsis, Moonbeam, but amazingly Autumn Blush is self-cleaning!
Gardening is personal and subjective. Some people are thrilled with all color, all the time. Over the long term, perennials are more economic and perhaps more satisfying than filling the garden with annuals and tender perennials every spring.
As a young gardener, I was frustrated that my garden finished flowering in mid-July after the first flush of roses. It was a real challenge to find compatible plants to transition to late summer and fall. If some of the many new long-blooming plants were available, they would have been gratefully welcomed.