I am not ready to surrender my garden for winter. I know it’s exciting to see Halloween candy in the stores and start contemplating holiday decor, but I am still stuck in summer. As such, I keep adding color to my fall garden, and you can too. Here are some surefire annuals to keep your garden bright from now until the frost (and, in some cases, beyond).
Salvia
My friend Cynthia, who runs the popular 42nd Street Greenhouse in Salt Lake City, advised me once that I should plant all the salvia I could. Since Cynthia is my flower guru, I listened. Red salvia attracts hummingbirds, shoots up about a foot off the ground in spires of blooms, and will bring a pop to your garden.
Credit: Amanda Blum
Stock
One of the most unfairly underrated flowers, you should march yourself into a florist and ask for some stock right now and stick your nose right into it and smell. I’ve been obsessed with stock since I worked at a florist shop in college. These upright flowers look like smaller, compact versions of snapdragons, but they smell magical. They are single bloomers, which means each plant produces one bloom, and pruning it will only kill the plant. Enjoy the single bloom, then allow it to die.
Pansies and violas
Ditch your spent petunias and replace them with the similar but cold-hardy pansy or viola. While pansies are here for a good time, not a long time, they’ll bring low lying purple, blue, and yellow pops to your yard. I advise keeping them to pots, planters, and garden edges or they’ll get lost, but they look great as spillover plants.
Nasturtiums
Once you plant nasturtiums in your garden, they live there forever. They’ll self-seed and come back year after year, but that’s a blessing, not a curse. Nasturtiums act as aphid traps for other plants, luring them away from your edibles. Nasturtium flowers are delicious, and the seeds can be pickled into capers.
Credit: Amanda Blum
Ornamental cabbage and kale
You won’t catch me eating kale, but I’ll grow the heck out of it for my yard. This is decorative, non edible kale, and it comes with frills, spikes, and ruffles with dramatic pinks, creams, and yellows against bright green.
Peas
While there’s not enough time to get another round of sweet peas in, you can absolutely get regular edible peas in, which will come with their own sweet little purple and white flowers. Use them on trellised areas because they’ll want to climb and they need the support.
Credit: Amanda Blum
Sweet Alyssum
Alyssum belongs to the holy trifecta of beneficial plants in my garden (nasturtium, alyssum, and marigold), all of which perform some service to your other plants either by repelling pests or trapping them away from other plants. That would be reason enough to plant it, but it is also magical in the garden. When you purchase starts, they are small plugs with ten or so tiny blooms. Alyssum will bloom into giant puffy clouds of tiny blooms that spill over your beds. While the white alyssum is the most prolific and cold-hardy, there are pink and purple versions that are also charming (but don’t get as puffy and don’t tend to overwinter).
