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Five plants for the mid-summer garden

NIKI JABBOUR lifestyles@herald.ca @Nikijabbour

In my next column, I’ll be continuing my botanical tour around the province with a stop at The Tangled Garden in Grand Pré, but until then I wanted to celebrate summer with a few of my favourite mid-summer bloomers. Below you’ll find a collection of plants to add colour, fragrance, and long-lasting interest to the July garden.

SUMMERSWEET

I fell in love with summersweet before I even glimpsed the plant. It was late July and I was visiting a garden where a rich scent had settled over the entire backyard. The culprit? Summersweet, a shrub native to parts of North America including southern Nova Scotia. I now have a white flowering summersweet tucked near my back deck so we can enjoy weeks of that alluring aroma.

There’s no excuse for not finding space for summersweet as it’s a compact shrub that grows just four to six feet tall. The fluffy flowers are white, or pink if you buy ‘Ruby Spice’, and loved by bees, hummingbirds, and butterflies.

CAROLINA ALLSPICE

The latest addition to my garden is Carolina allspice, often called spicebush or sweetshrub. This is a summer-flowering shrub native to North America which grows six to seven feet tall and wide. The large reddish-purple flowers resemble magnolia blooms and emerge in early July, persisting for weeks. The showy flowers are also fragrant (as are the leaves and bark) with a fruity-spicy aroma. Carolina allspice prefers full sun to partial shade and is a low-care shrub that is bothered by few pests or diseases.

CONEFLOWERS

Purple coneflower is an herbaceous perennial native to parts of North America. It’s hardy, pest and disease resistant, long-blooming, and very pollinator-friendly. There are countless cultivars to plant with flowers that can be single or double. I prefer single flowering coneflowers as I’ve found them to be more vigorous and winter hardy, as well as more attractive to bees and butterflies.

The flower colour range includes classic purple as well as white, pink, red, orange, yellow, and green. If you’ve got space in your perennial garden, head to your favourite Nova Scotia nursery to pick up a few coneflowers. Just be sure to give them a site with at least six hours of sunlight and well-draining soil.

Dahlias aren’t difficult to grow and have similar needs as tomatoes: full sun, decent soil, and regular moisture.

DAHLIAS

Each May I plant around a dozen dahlia tubers in my raised vegetable beds to attract pollinators and provide plenty of flowers for bouquets. There are dozens of types of dahlias and tens of thousands of named cultivars. The variety of flower shapes, sizes, and colours is incredible and it’s hard to limit myself to just a dozen. This year I’m growing my absolute favourite dahlia ‘Café au Lait’, as well as many new-to-me cultivars like ‘Elsi’, ‘Cornel,’ and ‘Cornel brons’. The midsummer show has just begun and will continue until hard frost.

Dahlias aren’t difficult to grow and have similar needs as tomatoes: full sun, decent soil, and regular moisture. If you dream of gathering armfuls of dahlia blooms, make a note in your calendar now to plant tubers next May.

MILKWEED

Last winter I planted swamp milkweed seeds I got from the Mersey Tobiatic Research Institute’s butterfly club (Head to Merseytobeatic.ca for more info). I sowed the seeds in milk jugs and left them outside for the winter. The cold temperatures stratified the seeds and prompted germination. By early May I had almost twenty seedlings to tuck into my new perennial beds. Swamp milkweed is our only native milkweed and is an attractive, well-behaved milkweed that can be used by monarch butterflies as a larval host plant.

Other types of milkweed you can plant in your garden include butterfly weed, which has spectacular orange flower clusters, and common milkweed which is beautiful but can be a garden thug, so plant it in a spot where it can roam.

Niki Jabbour is the best-selling author of three gardening books, and a two-time winner of the prestigious American Horticultural Society Book Award. Her latest book, Growing Under Cover is now available. Find her at Savvygardening.

CULTURE

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2021-07-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

2021-07-24T07:00:00.0000000Z

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