Tip of the Week — 10/14/08

Posted in Gardening Tips on October 14 2008, by Sonia Uyterhoeven

Autumnal Beauties
Sonia Uyterhoeven is Gardener for Public Education at The New York Botanical Garden.

Beauties come in all shapes and sizes in the fall.

Some foliage turns from green to a brilliant scarlet as the cold nights trap sugars inside the leaves and trigger the production of the pigment anthocyanin. Two of my favorites are Virginia sweetspire (Itea virginica), which is engulfed in a burgundy flame in the fall, and the high bush blueberry (Vaccinium corymbosum), which morphs from yellow to orange to red.

Once the Kousa dogwoods (Cornus kousa) have finished feeding the birds with plump raspberry-shaped berries, the foliage turns a beautiful scarlet. This serves as a splendid backdrop to the statuesque Aster tartaricus ‘Jin dai’ that sends up tall spires covered with purple-blue daisylike flowers.

The best flower power in the garden undoubtedly comes from the perennial sunflowers and the hardy hibiscus. The dinner plate-sized flowers of the hardy hibiscus come in a beautiful array of pinks, mauves, and whites—often larger than the breadth of my hand. My two favorites this year is an impressive white named Hibiscus ‘Blue River II’ and a crinkled mauve named ‘Fantasia’.

The perennial sunflowers are covered with bright yellow flowers late in the season. Helianthus salicifolius ‘First Light’ opens up in late September. It is a shorter cultivar, reaching only 4 feet tall. This generally means no staking, a gift for the low-maintenance gardener. My favorite is the double flowering Helianthus decapetalus ‘Plenus’. This perennial sunflower blooms a month earlier than most of it compatriots, opening mid-August and extending into September.