Gardenia blossoms make everything better. Photo by María Helena Carey.
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As the dog days descend upon us, I am revisiting an old adage on summertime gardening that is new to me: Weed it, Water it, and Whack it back.
I like horticultural truisms, especially those that come in threes. All my containers have a ‘thriller, filler, and spiller.’ I would love to quote the one about ‘the first year it sleeps, the next year it creeps, and then the next year it leaps’, but can never remember to which specimen it is referring. Instead, I donned one of my skinny ties from days gone by and am going to give you three glorious examples some old garden staples that you ought to take a look at again. These will invigorate your plot with a new breath of air just when it starts to seem tired, ordinary, and swelteringly dull.
Gardenias and hydrangeas have long been mainstays in the Southern garden. Face it people, DC is a southern city (at least horticulturally speaking). With the advent of new cultivars bred from the northern hardy Gardenia radicans we, too, can have glorious ever-so-sweet scented varieties like Kliem’s Hardy, August Beauty, and Double Mint. Can’t you picture plucking one of those creamy white blossoms on your way out the gate and sticking it in your buttonhole when headed to work? When it comes to hydrangeas, go beyond the stereotypical macrophylla (the puffy-flowered mopheads that bloom either pink or blue depending on your soil pH). Try instead the arborescens or the paniculata grandiflora, aka the PeeGee hydrangea. These shrubs bloom much later in the season and can add a mass of crisp white blossoms when other flowers have faded or turned a dull brown.
Good old Coleus saves the day with masses of color, super easy care, and a huge bang for a teeny tiny buck. (And if you pull the old granny trick of making cuttings each fall, you can have them next year for FREE). Bland cultivars green and red have given way to stripes, blotches, and contrasting veins in chartreuse, burgundy, purple and white. One small plant installed in either your flower bed or a container (as a thriller or filler, of course – hahahaha!) will yield two the three feet of brilliantly colored leaves and some fairly impressive flowers, too. The leaf is the main attraction, but the flowers can be up to a foot tall, with spikes of either white of purple blossoms shooting out of the main plant. There are varieties for sun and other varieties for shade, but I’ve had great success mixing them up. Back in the spring, when everything else was popping into bloom, coleus was just kinda sitting there, but now the understudy steps up into the lead role and belts out a tune that might be a little brassy but sure has a lotta punch.
I know that everybody says, “Ugh – gladiolus, they remind me of funerals,” but I say that’s the Old point of view. The variety and easy availability of glads on the market should make you take a New look at them. Solids and primary colors are out and stripes and vivid hues are in. You can find gladiolus in quite seriously any shade, tint, or hue you are searching for. Need an orange to go with your blackberry lilies? Got it. Need a deep magenta to augment those coneflowers? Right over here. Need a pale pea-green with white frills to perfectly accent the new PeeGee hydrangea and all that chartreuse coleus I convinced you to plant next year? Nailed it!
If you stagger your planting times (It’s really not that hard – just put it on your calendar and then go out there and stick the next round of bulbs in the ground. No fuss: Just Do It!) you can have blossoms all July, August, and into September. On top of that, our fair Southern city has been allowing me to leave the gladiolus bulbs in over the winter and they have now come up three years in a row. So think back to Aunt Ceilly’s place and visualize what was in bloom when you went to visit her before going back to school. Most likely there will be a new re-invigorated version looking for a place in your garden today. Then grab a tall glass of sweet tea and sit back and enjoy.