A year of seasonal plants

Each month, a different plant can color your world

By Pat Rubin

People often ask whether I have a favorite flower. I have hundreds, I reply, and my goal is to have them all in my garden. I want to be able to go out into the garden any day of the year and pick a bouquet of flowers, berries or foliage. These dozen plants, selected because they epitomize a particular month of the year, are among my favorites, and will get us all closer to that goal.

January

Red twig dogwood (Cornus sericea)

For nine months of the year, the red twig dogwood, also called red osier dogwood, is sort of boring. Sure, it has nice green foliage, isn’t fussy about where it grows and the white-flower clusters are nice, though nothing like its showy cousins.

But once the leaves fall away and winter sweeps its cold across the land, the stems and twigs turn bright red (there are also green twig and black twig varieties). It’s a beautiful sight, especially if you live in the snow. Cut the twigs for arrangements and bring them into the house.

The plant occurs naturally in wetland areas, so plant it where it will get regular water. Prune away all of the oldest stems each year to encourage new ones since it’s the new wood that turns red. Red twig dogwood can grow up to 6 to 8 feet tall and several feet across.

The flowers attract bees and the foliage is host to the spring azure butterfly. The deer will feed on the leaves as well, but the plants bounce back quickly.

February

Daffodil (Narcissus sp.)

Daffodils are cheerful flowers, and they typically start blooming here in California sometime in February, which is earlier than bloom time for most of the country.

The term “daffodil” is the common name for all the spring flowering bulbs in the genus Narcissus and covers paperwhites and jonquils. Bulbs are inexpensive unless you want some of the newest or rare varieties.

Never plant bulbs in a straight row; always plant them in clumps—three or four bulbs in one hole. With a nod to the book “The Secret Garden,” I used to give my daughter and her friends a few bulbs to plant wherever they liked, and it would be a surprise the next spring when the bulbs came up and bloomed.

March

Sweet pea (Lathyrus odoratus)

Add a wonderful, heady fragrance (odoratus means fragrant) to your garden with sweet peas. These are not the traditional edible peas found in vegetable gardens.

Sweet peas are grown strictly for their flowers, and the flowers and seed pods can be mildly toxic to people and pets. The flowers are beautiful—shades of mauve, pink, lavender, purple and cream.

You can scatter the seeds and let them come up where they may. I plant them in my raised beds inside tomato cages so they have something to climb. This makes them much easier to cut for flowers.

You can leave the flowers to go to seed at the end of the season. Collect the seed and replant it in the fall.

April

Lilac (Syringa vulgaris)

The term “vulgaris” means “common,” but I find nothing common about lilacs. They epitomize spring flowers for me, and I like nothing more than to be able to go out into the garden when the lilacs are blooming, stick my face into the flowers and breathe in deeply.

Lilacs are in the olive family, so are related to ash trees and forsythia. They make small trees. Give them a sunny spot with lots of circulation, good drainage, decent soil and regular water and they’ll reward you with plenty of flowers every spring.

Prune them just after the flowers have faded since lilacs produce next year’s flowers after the current year’s flowers have faded. Look for lilacs at nurseries in spring when they are blooming so you get the color and fragrance you like.

May

Bearded iris (Iris germanica)

Many gardeners complain the iris bloom season is too short, and the foliage left behind after the flowering stems have been cut away can look tattered by July and will need to be cut back.

Despite these strikes against this beautiful flower, it continues to be hugely popular. Iris farms do a booming business every spring, selling new and old-fashioned iris varieties. And rightly so. The flowers are gorgeous and irises are tough survivors. They grow well with ample water and loving care but can survive with neglect in abandoned fields and homesteads for years.

The iris is named after the Greek goddess famous for riding rainbows. The most familiar iris in a genus of about 250 species is the tall bearded iris. They are called bearded because of the soft hairs on the hanging petals. Botanists have created bearded irises that will rebloom mid-summer.

June

English lavender (Lavandula angustifolia)

Is it a shrub or an herb? Likely both, but all gardeners need to know is that it’s as beautiful as it is tough.

Plant it close to paths so you can rub your hands across the leaves as you walk by. The fragrance is soothing and relaxing. English lavender is actually a Mediterranean native and loves plenty of sun.

Go easy on the water, but don’t deprive the plant of regular water. This plant also demands good drainage, so don’t plant it in a soppy-wet location.

If you cut away the first flush of flowers, you’ll get a second bloom, although the flowers will be smaller.

Opinions vary on how severely to cut it back each year. I’ve found cutting it back almost to the base after it’s finished blooming keeps it blooming well for years.

Lavender gets quite woody as it ages, and typically needs to be replanted after seven or eight years.

It’s a losing battle, so at some point, you will have to replace the plants. But there are so many beautiful new varieties from which to choose when it’s time to replant.

July

Sunflower (Helianthus annuus)

The old-fashioned 10-foot-tall sunflowers with one huge flower at the top are certainly regal, beautiful and fun to grow. Still, my preference is for the multi-branching varieties that produce multitudes of flowers until the first frost kills the plants. The variety of flower shapes and colors is amazing: yellow, cream, burgundy, orange and multiple colors on one flower. They beg to be cut and brought into the house for arrangements. The more you cut, the more flowers they produce.

Sunflowers are native to the Americas. They track the sun, and if you look closely, you’ll see each flower is actually hundreds of tiny flowers.

Check seed catalogs online or just look through the seed selection at your local nursery. You’ll find plenty of variety. I love them all.

Scatter the seeds in garden beds and cover them lightly. Keep seedlings watered and protected from the sun until they are off to a good start. I find seeds planted in the fall are more vigorous than seedlings from spring-planted seeds.

American goldfinches love sunflowers, too. But it’s not the seeds they produce that lure these little beauties to the plants. They love the foliage and will turn the leaves into tatters. The plants seem to be able to keep growing anyway.

                               

August

Crepe myrtle (Lagerstroemia indica)

Crepe myrtles bloom from July through September. To me, they epitomize summer. By late summer, most plants have finished blooming and the garden can look a little bare and tired. And then the crepe myrtles burst into bloom with their huge clusters of bright pink (or white or light pink or red) flowers. When the petals start to fall, it can turn the ground pink.

This Chinese native is a wide-spreading, deciduous multi-stemmed shrub or tree. I prefer the multi-stemmed look rather than training them into a single-stemmed tree. They’re hardy and tough. After all, you’ll see crepe myrtles planted alongside city streets and in center medians.

While the flowers are certainly beautiful, don’t forget to look at the bark. As the plants age, the bark starts to peel, and beneath the rough young bark is smooth bark that looks like marble.

September

Chrysanthemum (Chrysanthemum x morifolium)

The chrysanthemum is rightly called the queen of fall flowers. The flowers come in shades of yellow, pink, lavender, red, purple, orange, white and russet, and range in size from tiny pom-poms to giant spiders and quills.

Most chrysanthemums are hardy perennials and come back year after year, except those sold as potted plants in garden centers every fall. Those will not overwinter.

Hardy mums are best planted in spring. Keep them watered and give them a light dose of fertilizer regularly. Keeping blooms cut encourages the plant to produce more blooms.

Whether you choose to grow hardy mums or just pick up a few pots for fall decoration doesn’t matter. Enjoy the color and cheer they bring to the autumn season.