Early summer is a time of bounty in any garden. A full canopy of leaves on trees and shrubs form lush clouds of green overhead, and sunny beds boast an abundance of beautiful blossoms. The list of early-summer bloomers is a long one. The starlets of the early-summer garden are hardy perennials that spend spring growing new stems and leaves in preparation for a bright flush of flowers.
However, climate and latitude strongly affects which plants figure most prominently in your garden at this time. Peonies and irises are a mainstay in gardens of the North, accompanied, perhaps, by pink or blue campanulas and clematis. Roses can be counted on to perfume the early-summer air. Farther south, early summer belongs to elegant lilies and hydrangeas of every type, from the French hydrangeas with their huge blue flowers to the shade-loving, white-flowered oakleaf types.
If you need a wide variety of sizes, shapes, textures, and flower colors summer after summer without replanting, you should collect perennials. The simplest way of filling your early-summer garden with care-free color is to infuse the garden with two or three perennials that bloom simultaneously.They need not stand side by side. In fact, a more pleasing picture might be staged by sprinkling the flowering perennials among other plants that are not yet in bloom, and won't compete for attention.
Framing Feature Flowers
When featured flowers are framed against green foliage plants, or late blooming perennials, they often look more refined than when they stand alone, or cheek-by-jowl with other showy flowering plants. Try using silvery leaved plants like lavender to frame a bright flowering plant like a bush of red roses. Plants with pale gray or bluish foliage, such as lavender, artemisia, lamb's ears, rose campion, and Russian sage, always make good framing plants for snappier neighbors. Or, set your flowering plants off by surrounding them or backing them with plants that have striking, dark foliage, such as dwarf boxwoods, liriope, dark burgundy black cohosh, or even smokebush.
Care-Free Annual Edgings
Plan to grow an abundance of annuals in climates that are very hot in summer or very cold in winter, because both extremes limit the number of perennials that will thrive there. Annuals, because they only live during the growing season, aren't affected by winter's worst weather. And in summer, many annuals like nothing better than blooming for weeks on end, unaffected by heat, humidity, and strong sun. Annuals will provide nonstop color in high-visibility beds and containers, and they can even thrive in the dry, hot strips of soil abutting driveways, sidewalks, and median strips.
Put annuals to work unifying the landscape, no matter where you live. Each summer, install a handful of annuals in your yard in the same way you might use colorful ribbon to decorate a wrapped gift. Edge beds with ribbons of flowering annuals. Or run them in small drifts through existing perennial flower beds. But be sure to save a few annuals for planting in containers. The design idea here is to repeat the use of the same annuals in different parts of your yard, echoing threads and splashes of color throughout the landscape, making the garden look and feel like a cohesive unit.
When choosing annuals, look for those that have a long flowering time for your climate. Some like it cold. Flowering cabbage, lobelias, pansies, and sweet alyssum are good candidates where temperatures remain cool in fall and early spring, or even as winter annuals in hot climates. Moderate summer climates are ideal places to grow garden standbys like petunias and impatiens. Where summers are very hot, choose heat-tolerant annuals like ager-atum, caladiums, annual grasses, narrow-leaf zinnia, or any wax begonia.
The color range in annuals is so great that you can have fun experimenting with different color combinations and plant shapes from year to year while maintaining the same perennials and shrubs. Annuals are so inexpensive that you can even experiment with those that are marginally suited to your area. Sometimes you can find a spot for a container of annuals that is sheltered from the sun, or from brisk, chilly winds, expanding the number of plants that you can grow.
Adding Height
If there seems to be something missing in your summer garden that you can't quite put your finger on, perhaps what you really need is more vertical interest. Plants that rise high, such as vines grown on arbors or upright trellises, shrubs with an upright habit like columnar jumpers, or even a climbing rose attached to a post or pillar, give your eyes a welcome break from looking down into the garden. As you raise your head to admire vertical plants, you can't help taking in the view of the wonderful tree canopies and the brilliant blue sky, which you might otherwise miss. Vertical plants make maximum use of ground space, so they are especially functional in a small garden. And, in addition, fast-growing annual vines like morning glory, hops, and scarlet runner bean, can give an instant look of maturity to new beds.
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