Plan Your Garden For Fall Color

Posted by Katie Elzer-Peters
June 29th, 2009
Filed in Garden Maintenance
Tags: fall, garden color, Seasonal Garden Maintenance

Your yard and garden can look just as great in the fall as it does during the spring and summer, if you plan ahead and plant accordingly.

Setting the Stage

For the super stars of your fall color garden spectacular to show up, you need a nice background. In beautiful, mountainous regions with spectacular fall color (think Vermont), evergreen trees scattered throughout the mountainside provide a bit of backdrop and “punch,” against which the bright reds of the sugar maples and clear yellows of the birches pop. Holly trees, pines, spruce trees, arborvitae and junipers make good backdrops for fall color from other large trees. Tea olives, yews, ivy, periwinkle, and other, smaller evergreen shrubs and perennials provide a background for other perennials and shrubs with fall color.

Perennials with Pretty Fall Color

When planning a beautiful fall garden, think beyond trees and include perennials:

• Our spotlight plant, Blue Star, has great yellow fall color.
• Sedum blooms in the fall, and many varieties also change color in the fall.
• Joe-Pye weed is a giant perennial that blooms in the fall. Its leaves turn a reddish color when it has finished blooming.
• Chrysanthemums and asters also bloom later than almost any plant in the garden.

Other perennials with pretty fall foliage include: balloon flowers (yellow foliage), plumbago (red foliage), bloody geranium – Geranium sanguineum (red), and switchgrass (red).

Underused Trees and Shrubs with Fall Color

Native plants are always preferable for organic gardeners. When you plant natives, you can attract birds and other wildlife to your yard.

Serviceberries (Amelanchier spp.) are native to North America, provide great food and shelter for birds, and have three season interest. They bloom white during the spring, and produce a profusion of red berries during the summer. In the fall, the leaves turn brilliant red or orange. They grow to be no taller than about 25 feet, which makes them great to plant in landscape beds closer to the house, or on the edge of the yard against an evergreen backdrop.

Black tupelo (Nyssa sylvatica), is a medium-sized tree that grows to a height of about 50 feet. It does best in moist soils that are high in organic matter, but is, overall, a tough tree, thriving in a wide variety of conditions. You can almost always recognize the tupelo by its branching habit, because the branches grow out from the trunk at strict 90 degree angles, creating a platform or pagoda-like appearance. The fruits of the tupelo are some of the earliest to ripen in the fall, and provide food for many species of birds. The leaves turn dark red to purple, and, in some cases, orange, in the fall. This tree is an under-utilized gem in the landscape.

The bottlebrush buckeye (Aesculus parviflora), gets its name from its summer flower stalks that are tall, white, and look like bottle brushes. This shrub also has pretty fall color. The leaves turn bright yellow. The plant can naturally spread to cover an eight foot by eight foot area, but does do well with pruning. It prefers acidic, well-drained soil and a spot in full sun to part shade.