With our beloved summer blooms putting on their final show, it’s time to start thinking about fall features. Of course, our North Carolina landscapes are naturally graced with a gorgeous palette of warm autumn shades. However, when it comes to your garden, why not explore with more than just foliage?
From pretty fall blooms to ornamental fall berries, here are our favorite plants to accentuate your fall garden:
From pretty fall blooms to ornamental fall berries, here are our favorite plants to accentuate your fall garden:
Beautyberry
Appropriately named for its beautiful berries, this native shrub will naturalize your landscape while also adding spectacular fall and winter interest. They manage to hold their own throughout spring and summer, with gracefully arching branches, bright green foliage, and white-pink flower clusters. However, it’s their fall fruits that really make them shine. Bright purple berry clusters adorn this bush, attracting birds and persisting well into winter. We love American Beautyberry for its classic purple color, but we also carry White Beautyberry, which features gorgeous, cream-colored fruits instead.
Swamp Sunflower
This moisture-loving sunflower grows naturally in flood plains and other wet areas but also does quite well when planted in landscapes with enough water to keep it happy. Blooming from late summer through fall, the characteristic towering stems and golden-yellow color of these flowers are sure to compliment your autumn landscape. Like most sunflowers, this variety will produce better blooms when planted in full sun, but will also perform well in partially shaded areas.
Fall-Blooming Camellia
With fabulous, ruffled blooms in a remarkable range of bright and cheerful colors, fall-blooming camellia shrubs might trick you into thinking it’s springtime. They also take on a variety of different flower forms, including single, double, tubular, and even peony-like—there’s a camellia for everyone’s taste and preference. While some bloom in winter or early spring, we can recommend some fantastic varieties that will provide your garden with fabulous fall blooms:
- ‘Kanjiro’ Camellia features large, single blooms with stunning, hot pink flowers and yellow eyes.
- ‘Yuletide’ Camellia blooms just in time for the holiday season, decorating your garden with festive, dark red blooms with showy yellow eyes.
- ‘Mine No Yuki’ Camellia is a popular fall-blooming camellia that produces elegant, ruffled, snow-white flowers. A perfect choice for gardeners who don’t want bright blooms to clash with the autumn color scheme.
Encore Azaleas
Encore azaleas are a series of sun-tolerant azalea shrubs that return with a second round of blooms in late summer and fall. Ranging from 3-5 feet tall, smaller varieties are perfect for flower beds, foundation planting, and container planting while larger varieties are suitable accents or hedges! Encore azaleas bloom in white (‘Autumn Angel’, ‘Autumn Moonlight’), pink (‘Autumn Chiffon’, ‘Autumn Sweetheart’), purple (‘Autumn Lilac’, ‘Autumn Twist’), and red (‘Autumn Bravo’, ‘Autumn Sunset’).
Turk's Cap
This small, dense shrub provides year-round interest to your landscape with its evergreen, slightly-lobed leaves. Aside from reliable foliage, Turk’s Cap also offers unusual, bright red, tubular flowers with overlapping petals and protruding stamens. Share these showy blooms with butterflies and hummingbirds from late summer to fall, at which time they turn into red, berry-like drupes that last well into fall.
Turtlehead
As a native wildflower here in Greenville, turtlehead flowers are hardy perennials that require very little maintenance on your part. Sturdy, textured stems rise above their lush, dark green leaves, adding a sense of vertical interest despite the shortness of the stalks. Their late-summer to mid-fall tubular flowers are two-lipped, resembling the head of a turtle. Out favorite variety for fantastic fall color is ‘Hot Lips’ Turtlehead, which brightens your landscape with its rosy, hot-pink blooms.
You don't need to jump into Christmas cactus and poinsettias quite yet, there are plenty of plants that will accentuate your fall landscape wonderfully with blooms and berries. If you’d like to make some new additions to your garden this season, drop into our garden center in Greenville this week and check out our selection of fantastic fall plants!
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