Beyond Mums – More Beautiful Flowers for Fall

When you think of fall, do you see gardens bursting with chrysanthemum blooms?  Mums are beautiful, bringing us golds, russets, pinks, purple and white, but we can make our gardens even better by adding a few other flowers.

This plant here is Eupatorium Wayside, vigorous and hardy.  It’s about 18 inches tall and spreads about 2 feet on each side.  I got a couple extra plants this year when it reseeded along the fence – the new seedlings bloomed too.  Eupatorium is also called perennial ageratum, can you see why?

Eupatorium‎ September 29, 2015

Depending on the light the flowers are a medium blue tinted lavender to a deeper shade of china blue.  Here is the main plant with a late delphinium standing tall behind it.

Eupatorium‎ and Late Delphinium September 29, 2015

Many years ago I saw an arrangement using eupatorium and looked for it a long time.  White Flower Farm had it a few years, but at a pretty stiff price.  I kept it in mind and kept looking, then found it 2 years ago at Bluestone Perennials at a more affordable cost.

Eupatorium is related to Joe Pye weed, the tall weedy flower that loves growing in the ditch.  Joe Pye weed has dark reddish purple brown flowers and is not pretty.  This Wayside variety is an elegant cousin!

Asters, especially the Frikartii variety are another flower that I like to mix in with eupatorium and late phlox but my plant was wimpy last fall, with small flowers.  I ordered more asters for 2016, discussed in this post, and hope to get a colorful grouping of late blooming flowers in the blue to purple range.

Perennial sunflowers, helenium, late rudbeckia or gaillardia and goldenrod add gold and yellow and even red to late garden blooms.  My garden in the old house had a stand of perennial sunflowers and a yellow helenium that bloomed together along with the rubeckia Goldsturm and it warmed my heart to see.  I didn’t move the plants and now have only one perennial sunflower, a clear shade of yellow with crested flowers.  It’s pretty but I miss my old dahlia-flowered variety.  I grew the old plants from seed so who knows what the true variety was.

I intend to get some helenium this year.  This is a tall plant with 1-1/2 inch daisy type flowers in shades of yellow to red.  There are some new varieties that I keep coming back to in the flower catalogs that surely want to come live here.  This photo from Portland Nurseries shows the color range and size.  Helenium love to bloom and should do well here with all the sun.

Last fall my cosmos were stunning, especially three enormous plants along the fence.  They were over 5 feet tall and full of blossoms for weeks.

You can see we’re slowing down here with most plants ready to nap through the winter.  The cosmos plants bloomed another week or two after this picture, right until hard frost.

Here is a close up of one flower.  We had this two-tone variety and some deep crimson cosmos and the usual purple/pink ones that were volunteers, reseeded from the year before.

My garden is at its peak in the late spring when the peonies bloom along with Sweet Williams and early delphinium, but it trails off come July and rebounds in September with late annuals, mums and eupatorium.  I’m trying to rearrange it to cluster the flowers together that bloom at the same time.  Last fall there were too many bits and pieces, a flower here, a plant there, instead of a glowing clump of color.

We also had some plants that simply have to go.  They aren’t pretty enough to deserve the space they have.  Next post I’ll show a couple other flowers that are not so welcome!