Grow Beautiful Fall-Flowering Perennials
Five plants that will have you looking forward to autumn’s gorgeous blooms.
May 2009
By Caleb Melchior
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SPECKLED CHARM: Toad lilies (Tricyrtus) offer charming speckled blossoms in various shades of purple, white and yellow at the Missouri Botanical Garden in St. Louis.
Caleb Melchior
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In the excitement of spring planting, it’s easy to get carried away and fill your nursery cart with heaps of things for summer. However, before you rush home with a ton of fuchsias, nemisias and osteospermums, remember that these cool-season annuals will only bloom for a few weeks before fading away in the heat of summer.
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Instead, why not plant perennials, which offer their best in the fall. Here are five perennials that will give of their best from August onward, when cool weather returns.
Japanese anemone
The Japanese anemone and its hybrids are among the most pleasing of all fall flowers. They have dainty puff-in-saucer blooms that dangle from wiry stems, and each blossom is composed of six to eight shell-like pink or white petals surrounding a yellow powderpuff of stamens and pistils. While fragile in appearance, Japanese anemones are surprisingly tough. Once established, they’ll handle drought and a good deal of sun, although partial shade and moderately moist soil are the preferred growing conditions. They spread less in clay soils, which is nice for a small garden.
Two of the most popular white varieties are ‘Honorine Joubert’ – which grows up to four feet high, with a single row of petals – and ‘Whirlwind’ – which is slightly shorter and has semi-
double blooms. A good number of pink varieties are also available.
Begonia grandis
The begonia grandis loves shade, produces generous clear-pink blooms in autumn, and is winter hardy. There is also a white form available, along with a larger pink-bloomed variety called
‘Heron’s Pirouette.’
Another winter-hardy species, B. evansia, is sometimes classed as a subspecies of B. grandis, but is smaller overall and perhaps less vigorous. Perennial begonias prefer moist soils, and they don’t emerge until late spring – or sometimes not until June.
Chrysanthemum
The Korean and single-flowered hybrid chrysanthemums are quite different from the cushion mums, which everyone picks up at box stores, and the exhibition mums, which grow blossoms the size of footballs. The exhibition and cushion varieties are appealing for their brightness, size and availability, but they tend to perform poorly after their first season in the garden. That is not so with the Korean and single-flowered hybrids. These admirable plants have been selected for performance in the garden rather than a pot, and they’ll return year after year to grace your garden with an ever-increasing show of bloom. Many of these mums have been passed from gardener to gardener, so they bear simple names like ‘Single Apricot’ and ‘Single Peach,’ rather than the publicity directed codenames of the popular cushion varieties.