The pictures today show off the sunny border in the perennial garden I installed in the front lawn. This is a bed that gets full, blazing, hot sun all day long. It's also hard to water, so the plants there have to be tough.
The border is edged with three colors of Echinacea - purpurea (purple), White Swan (white), and a yellow. I bought a garden collection of seeds from Park Seed in 2008, started them under lights, planted them outside and crossed my fingers. Today, not only did they thrive, but their offspring are crowded under the shadows of the white snowball Viburnum near the center.
I added three colors of daylilies which you can see peeking from behind the Echinacea. There's Stella D'Oro, the small, compact daylily with piercing yellow flowers. I added the one most people call the wild type, the orange flowers. And I have one that has no name but produces the most beautiful orange-peach colored flowers. It's sort of the color of the orange and vanilla ice cream mix you can get at the store, if you know what I mean. Yellow daisies and Gaillardia, started from seeds collected from the sunny driveway perennial garden, finish off the sunny border.
In the center of the bed is my white snowball Viburnum, a red tree peony which is nothing more than a twig right now, and a Festiva Maxima peony and a dwarf pink. There are also three crepe myrtles, light lavender and red.
Some garden designers suggest planting cool tones in the hot sun, but I love the hot, hot look of bright yellows and oranges with a dash of purple. Why purple? It's one of my favorite colors. It also came with the seeds....
Happy Hot Friday! Temperatures are expected to reach 100 degrees Fahrenheit here again...yuck. Very unseasonable. Here's to watering and mulch!
4 comments:
I love these plants for their heat tolerance. Your border makes a lovely colorful splash.
A nice border. With full sunlight exposure I wonder how would sunflowers look like as borders.. ~bangchik
You picked the right colors. I say the hotter the better for the summer garden. I like the orange/yellow of daylilies with the pink coneflowers-have some of that combo in my garden myself. You have lots of color!
I have that tall, "wild", orange Daylily in my garden also (gift from volunteering for a rescue dig) and wish I knew its name. It's a stunning plant, but this year, after 3 weeks of 90+ degree heat, it looks at its poorest.
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