Walk into your local garden nursery in October, and you’ll see plenty of spring-flowering bulbs for sale to be planted in the fall. But live plants? It would seem that the only choice for flowers in the fall is potted chrysanthemums. Oh, what a limited palette! It wasn’t until a friend gifted me a native chrysanthemum that went wild in my garden that I truly learned what marvelous colors can be maintained in the flower garden throughout fall until first frost.
Some spring-blooming flowers repeat in the fall
Most gardeners quickly learn what blooms first in their spring garden: Crocus, Daffodils, Tulips, Hyacinths, Snowdrops, Hellebores, Phlox, Bleeding Hearts, and the like. What is more perplexing to new gardeners is finding the perfect fall-blooming flowers and other plants that will add color until the snow falls and hard freezes arrive. We get the wakeup call at some point when those beautiful flower beds of June turn bare and brown in late October. But there are plenty of annuals and perennials that are just beginning to bloom as the days get shorter in fall.
What you may not know is that many flowers that bloom in early spring, like Pansies and Violets, can also be enjoyed in your garden or as container plants in fall – they’re known as cool weather plants and are equally at home on either side of summer. You should also consider native perennial shrubs with showy fall berries, like American Beautyberry, Holly, Northern Bayberry, American Cranberry, and certain species of Viburnum (some species of Viburnum also hold their foliage deep into winter).
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A guide to fall-blooming plants
The chart below shows a selection of flowers that bloom in fall, defined as August through October, which can sometimes push into November. Naturally, bloom times vary depending on where you live – fall in Minnesota is radically different than fall in Texas, as are the species that bloom in those regions.
There are definitely more choices than we’ve listed here. If we missed your favorite fall-blooming annuals or perennials, please let us know in the comments below and we’ll add it to the chart!
P.S.: Fall is the best season to plant trees and shrubs due to its cool weather and still warm soil from summer.
