What will take their place as a color provider? Happily, some plants flower both before and after them, so the key for beginning gardeners is to become aware of these choices. Foliage plants can pick up some of the slack, too. You also must add some evergreens to your landscaping to have visual interest in your yard 365 days a year. Indeed, planting trees and shrubs is a great idea to achieve year-round color. They offer interest through their form and foliage as well as through their flowers. Any gardener seeking great color needs perennial flowers, so let’s learn about eight outstanding choices cold-hardy to at least USDA planting zone 5. For greater impact, there are two larger spring-flowering bulbs you can grow that are similar to G. nivalis:
Giant snowdrop (G. elwesii): 6 to 12 inches tallSpring snowflake (Leucojum vernum): up to 1 foot tall
These plants are classed as “spring ephemerals”: They don’t last for long. They put on their unique flowering display in April (in zone 5) then disappear. There’s no gangly foliage you have to leave standing around cluttering up your flower bed. Dutchman’s breeches are related to bleeding hearts (D. spectabilis), which offer a better-known choice for landscaping in mid-spring. The flower stalk of a torch lily is made up of many small flowers. Those at the bottom of the stalk go by first. As they do, their color fades, while the top part of the stalk remains a vibrant color. The effect is often two-toned (for example, orange up top and yellowish down below). Sticking with the orange theme for early summer, a selection that is reddish-orange is Firebird coneflower. Easter lilies (Lilium longiflorum), incidentally, despite their common name, bloom at this time in the Northeastern U.S. if you grow them in your landscaping (as opposed to buying greenhouse stock). Black-eyed Susan is another old-timer that supplies ample landscaping color in late summer. Not only do its blooms last a long time, but it is also a drought-tolerant perennial, which comes in handy in the scorching heat of August. Rosa Candy Oh! bushes furnish your flower beds with blossoms at a time of year when many shrubs are valued more for their fall-foliage color than for their flowers. As landscape roses, they’re low-maintenance, but that’s not their only good quality. If you care about creating year-round color, you’ll love the fact that they bloom deep into autumn. Since they don’t mind being pruned, you don’t have to be afraid to prune them aggressively to keep them small in your flower beds. True, winter heath’s flowers are tiny, but what they lack in size, they make up for in numbers. Besides, any flower that blooms outdoors in winter in a cold climate is appreciated, regardless of its size. Winter heath is a small shrub, small enough that it will fit right into your flower bed as if it were a perennial. Winter jasmine could also be classified as a vine plant. It can be easily maintained at a small size via shearing. How you shape it during pruning will determine whether it ends up looking like a shrub or a vine.
