Neil Sperry: Colorful summer blooms that can take the heat

If you’ve gotten a late start on filling your landscape with warm-season color, don’t worry. I’m right there with you — as are plenty of other North Texas gardeners. Our unusual weather has created some gardening challenges, and many of us are doing now what would normally have been accomplished by late April or early May.

Spring favorites petunias and geraniums didn’t stand a chance in our gardens this year. I moved directly to those plants that my friend Jimmy Turner refers to as “flame-proof.” So, with June in my rear-view mirror, I finally spent a warm morning of shopping and two hard days working in the landscape before I had my bright summer colors planted, potted, positioned and ready to prosper.

Here’s a list of the plants I chose.

Gold Star esperanza

I am a sucker for bright, sunshiny yellow, and this plant more than fulfills. It is native to the hot, dry conditions of Texas, and the Gold Star strain blooms more heavily and consistently than others. It grows to be 4 feet tall in our area and twice that in South Texas, where it survives the winter. Its flowers resemble our common trumpetvines, but they look like golden shafts of sunlight.

Hummingbirds love it almost as much as I do. I grow it in pots, and I put it into my greenhouse over the winter. If you don’t have access to a greenhouse, it can be used as an annual.

Pentas

I have a couple of spots that get hot sunlight for four or five hours each midday in summer and medium shade before and after. Pentas handle all that and more. They’re available in shades of red, pink, white, purple and lavender, and they grow to be 12-16 inches tall. They bloom incessantly until frost, and again, the hummingbirds and butterflies love them.

Lemon lollipops

These are sometimes called yellow shrimp plants. They have a little more red pigmentation than the Gold Star esperanza so they’re not quite as cooling, but they bloom repeatedly throughout summer and fall. I’ve shown them in our own landscape several times on my Facebook page, and they get more comments than almost any other summertime bloomer I post.

I grow mine in a spot that gets morning sun with a little shade arriving by midafternoon, although I just planted some out in the sun as well. If you keep them well-nourished and watered, they should grow to be 24-28 inches tall.

Angelonias

These plants get listed as “summer snapdragons,” and I guess that’s a fair comparison. But their flowers are much smaller and more attractive to butterflies. The Serena strain is more compact, growing to 12-15 inches tall. They do best in sun or mostly sun. With colors that include purple, pink and white, these have become very familiar additions to our summer landscapes.

Cora periwinkles

I haven’t bought any Coras this year, but I still might because they are just so gorgeous. Besides their intense colors, they’re highly resistant to the water mold fungus that all but eliminated periwinkles as landscaping annuals. And talk about showy bloomers: These may be the best full-sun annuals available.

Croton

These are foliage plants rather than flowers, but they’re becoming quite popular in North Texas gardens. There’s also a much wider variety of colors, leaf shapes and growth forms than ever before. I shelter mine from the afternoon sun, but they give their best color if they have sunlight at least a few hours of the day.

This is another plant I put into the greenhouse when winter approaches. I had a dozen or so that had been there for 10 to 35 years, then I lost them two winters ago when both heaters shut down on the same night. But don’t worry. I’m back in the croton business again.

Coleus

One of my business associates accuses me of thinking about coleus night and day. It’s not quite that bad, but I have to admit that I love them. In fact, I took stock plants with me from my home in College Station when I transferred north to Ohio State years ago. I grew those plants in the OSU greenhouses, and when my wife and I were married, coleus decorated her folks’ landscape for our reception.

The thing that makes coleus even better today is that growers have produced types that do not bloom. (Flowers shut down the production of their colorful leaves.) Many of them have also been bred to do well in sunshine, and the leaf colors become amazing in the process.

Dragon Wing begonias

I’m a lifelong fan of regular wax-leaf begonias, but the hybrid Dragon Wings ramp up things a couple of notches. They’re twice as tall and their leaves are twice as large. More importantly, the flowers are two or three times larger than what you’ll find on the wax begonias. Red and pink types predominate.

I buy 6-inch pots and hanging baskets, and I plant them into 20-inch patio pots. Mine get a bit of morning sunshine until about 9, then filtered shade for the rest of the day. They also do well in flower beds.

This story was originally published July 2, 2015 at 11:52 AM with the headline "Neil Sperry: Colorful summer blooms that can take the heat."