Guide to Adding Fall Color

A quick guide to creating a stunning, colorful fall garden! Our gardening expert Debbie sheds light on the three essential components of creating a beautiful fall garden--evergreens, perennials and annuals. Also, you'll learn of some of the most amazing plant choices for your garden.

Hi. I'm Debbie with Spring Hill and today we're going to talk about how you can keep your garden sizzling even after summer fades away and the fall approaches. There are three components to having a really nice garden in the fall. The first are your evergreens, which are the backbone of your garden. The second are your perennials which include your shrubs and your roses and the third are your seasonal fall annual colors. Now let's talk about each of those three. Evergreens are the foundation to any garden. They give you a nice burst of color without any blooms and they give you four seasons of interest. You notice boxwood or these miniature barberries, any type of evergreen will help you to set the tone for the rest of your garden no matter what season it is. The second component to a great fall garden are your long season blooming perennials. You notice in this garden, we have some hydrangea, some beautiful yellow rudbeckia or Black-Eyed Susan, and over in the corner, some coneflower or Echinacea. Now the great thing about perennials is they just keep getting better year after year. This garden was just planted this spring so next year, we're going to have twice as many flowers and twice as much density in these plants. Now when you think about your perennials, don't forget your daylilies and your roses. Yes, roses. People think of roses as this own magical category but they're just an everblooming perennial and, in many areas of the country, they'll bloom all the way through November and December. And you know, there are so many good, disease resistant varieties on the market so, if you live, for instant, east of the Mississippi and you have black spot pressure, you should be looking for roses such as this one which is called Home Run, a great healthy rose that mixes in beautifully with other perennials like Russian sage. So, this is a wonderful way to keep color coming back into your garden year after year. And the third component for giving your garden a seasonal pop of color are your annuals. Now of course, fall is synonymous with mums and asters, and why not, look at this rainbow of colors. You've got pink, magenta, purple, orange, look at this cute white one back here, yellow and red. So, what a way to take a garden that might be fading a little from the summer and just give it a nice facelift, kinda like the Zsa Zsa Gabor effect, you know, a little nip, little tuck there and BAM, a whole new pop of color! You know, you could also use some ornamental kale if you're looking for something a little bit different. But either way, annuals are a great way to keep your garden refreshed. No matter how big or small your garden space is, annuals are an easy, inexpensive way to take your garden from this to this. So, there you have it, the three components to a beautiful fall garden - your evergreens, perennials and, of course, your fall annuals.