Landscaping For Year-Round Interest Part 3
Landscape beds usually look pretty good in the spring and summer, but it’s common for things to start looking drab in the fall. That doesn’t have to be the case. If you’re going to put time and money into your landscape bed, you want something that’s beautiful in every season.
Join us for a four-part blog series that will help you create year-round interest in your landscape. We’re focusing on low-maintenance plants so you’ll have time to enjoy your beautiful landscape project rather than spending all your time on up-keep. This week, we talk about plants for a brilliant fall display.
Spring And Summer Holdovers
Some of the plants that made a bold statement in your summer garden will still pack a punch for fall. If you remove the spent blooms, crepe myrtle can keep blooming into early fall. After blooms are done, its fall leaf color ranges from yellow to orange to red.
Ornamental grasses stay attractive throughout fall. Some even display a striking fall foliage change. Evergreen plants like certain varieties of magnolia and rhododendron that you planted for spring blooms maintain an attractive glossy green backdrop to the landscape bed.
Fall Blooming Plants
There’s no reason the display of flowers has to go away in the fall. Just remember when planning your landscape to include a balanced array of plants with different bloom times.
- Coneflowers (Echinacea spp.) are an easy-to-grow fall favorite. There’s a variety of bloom colors available and after the flowers fade you can leave the seedpods up for winter interest. They’re typically hardy in USDA hardiness zones 3 to 9.
- Mexican Bush Sage (Salvia leucantha) is an attractive little bush in spring and summer, then in the fall it’s covered in purple blooms that attract hummingbirds. It’s hardy in zone 7b (that’s the Dallas area) and farther south.
- Sedum (Sedum spp.) starts blooming in early fall and the flower color only becomes more striking as the weather gets cool. They have attractive succulent leaves that look good in the garden spring through fall, when many varieties turn yellow, orange, or red. They’re hardy in zones 3 to 9.
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Flowering Vines
You already have trees and shrubs in place to provide structure in the garden, and most will still look good into fall. So let’s spend some time talking about vines. These plants all grow well in Texas, flower throughout the fall, and will climb over structures like trellises, arbors, or chain link fences.
- Climbing Carolina Aster (Aster carolinianus) has 10-foot shoots that can be trained to climb. Little purple blooms cover the plants all fall. It’s hardy in zones 4 through 8.
- Coral Vine (Antigonon leptopus) is a vigorous, drought tolerant plant that blooms late summer through fall. It will die back to the ground after the first frost but is hardy in zones 8 through 10. Grow in a protected location and mulch the roots well.
- Sweet Autumn Clematis (Clematis ternifolia aka paniculata) blooms white and is the only clematis reliably hardy in Texas. It is a large, sprawling plant that if not supported can form a groundcover mat that chokes out weeds and other plants. It’s hardy in zones 5 through 11.
Seasonal Care
The best time to plant fall-blooming plants is in the spring. If you’re planting in the summer, you’ll need to provide plenty of water and perhaps set up a shade canopy if it’s really hot. Once the landscape bed is established, your focus in the fall will be on keeping weeds out, removing spent foliage from bulbs that have gone dormant, and deadheading plants to encourage re-bloom. Fall is also the time to plant spring-blooming bulbs for next spring.
