Tag: vinca

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Suggestions for Plants That Like Our Heat

Summer is here, early, it seems, and any cool-weather plants I had not already replaced with heat-tolerant ones are unhappy. My peas are dead, and the broccoli that had not produced a crop is going to bolt to seed and skip forming a lovely head of broccoli. However, the weather is perfect for lima beans and okra, so get to work planting your garden.

In the flower garden, I’ve already replaced my pansies and cool-season plants with my favorite heat tolerant annuals. I water these a few times to get them comfortable in their new home, and then I ignore them the rest of the summer. They don’t even need deadheading. For sun, I use annual vinca, also called Madagascar periwinkle (see photo). It comes in shades of pink, white, and purple, and tolerates heat and drought. Deer don’t bother it. Do not confuse this with the evergreen vine called vinca; annual vinca is a bedding plant.

Annual Vinca

I also use Gomphrena globosa or gnome flower along the edges of my beds. It is available in pink, purple, and white, and blooms all summer with no care, and the cheerful yellow melapodium grows from last frost to first frost with no attention. I also use the sun tolerant annual begonia in borders and containers. For shade, impatiens bloom all summer with no attention from me.

When I planned my perennial garden, I consulted Jim Wilson’s book Bulletproof Flowers for the South and PJ Gartin’s book Some Like It Hot : Plants That Thrive in Hot and Humid Weather.  As the titles indicate, they list plants that don’t mind 97°F and 90% humidity. Some of the plants they endorse, and plants I use in my garden, include Achillea, or yarrow, a ferny-leaved 15-inch high plant with umbrella-shaped flowers. Coreopsis, which comes in shades of yellow and orange, smiles at the sun, and Butterfly bush blooms all summer and into the fall and attracts clouds of butterflies.

Sun-tolerant annual coleus provides interesting combinations of colors in its leaves, and coneflower, a native plant, provides long-lasting purple, pink, or white blooms. Daylilies are tough, as evidenced by their habit of continuing to grow and prosper in highway medians and in ditches where someone discarded them long ago. Most people that garden in the shade use hosta, and they combine nicely with impatiens and Japanese painted fern.

When I lived in Charleston, I loved the large Lantana bushes that grew around many homes. Unfortunately, lantana is not reliably cold hardy here, and the large bushes don’t usually develop, but the low-growing lantana will often survive the winter, loves the heat, and makes the bees and butterflies happy.

Scabiosa, also known as pincushion flower, comes in pink and purple and butterflies constantly cover it. It blooms in the very early spring and remains green throughout the winter. Deadheading it, or cutting off the dead blossoms, creates a flush of new blooms. In addition, I can’t forget my faithful salvias, veronicas, calaminthas, and catmints that continue blooming no matter how hot the weather.

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Summer Annuals

I finally christened my new (to me) car with a trip to the garden center yesterday to buy plants. After totaling my beloved 4Runner, which we bought new in 2002, back in February (everyone was okay, but the car wasn’t) I got a newer used replacement. I told my husband, Scott, that I did not want another new car for several reasons: I like the lower taxes, insurance, and lack of a car payment in an older vehicle, but most of all I want to haul plants and mulch in it without having to worry about damaging the car.

This car already has several scratches on it, so I won’t have the pain of putting the first scratch on a new car. My 4Runner was accustomed to hauling all manner of garden supplies, including bags of leaves off the side of the road I picked up to use as free mulch in my garden, and, although I have not hauled any leaves in this car yet, I have at least filled the roomy cargo area with flats of annuals and their accompanying dirt.  I did confine all the dirt to the plastic cargo mat instead of soiling the carpet.

I love the change in the seasons because I have an excuse to buy annuals. Most of my garden is filled with shrubs and perennials, but I reserve some areas for annual color. Yesterday, I went to Woodley’s Garden Center in Columbia and bought vincas, a heat loving and deer-resistant annual flower (not the vine) in pink and white, ageratums in blue, impatiens, gnome flowers, begonias, and petunias. I also got some Pineapple sage, because I have to have some every year; it blooms in the late summer and the hummingbirds love its red, tubular flowers. I also got Cuphea ‘Batface,’ a plant with red and purple flowers that look like a bat’s face. My girls will love it.

Today, before the rain ran us inside, I pulled out the bedraggled pansies and pruned back the dianthus in preparation for planting the annuals tomorrow. I will put them among the perennials along the front of the border, in pots, and in bare spots. This summer, look for some of these summer annuals in your local garden center. At my house, they keep going until frost with very little care.