Summer is without question my favorite season. I love the long days and the warm, dry weather. Here in the high desert, the hills are covered with sunflower-like balsamroot and intense blue bachelor buttons.
In my garden, I’m really not picky about flowers. I love any that are bright, deer-resistant, and somewhat drought-tolerant.
The Flowers I Love
My front deck, which gets plenty of morning sunlight, is perfect for growing annuals in containers and hanging baskets. Geraniums, wave petunias, and calibrachoa are my go-to plants every year, sometimes with lobelia or other small bloomers tucked in-between.
I prefer bright, fire-engine red geraniums. Calibrachoa and petunias can be any color as long as it includes purple and yellow, but absolutely no white. I’ve tried following a color scheme, but I prefer a crazy conglomeration of bright colors.
My back decks, which face west, are too hot for annuals, and the sunlight is too intense, although I’ve had good luck with zinnias in pots. I have yucca, both in pots and in the ground. The blooms in midsummer are incredible.
Prairie Wildflowers
My wild prairie garden is colorful with lupine and other desert wildflowers amid the rabbitbrush and sagebrush. It’s never been touched, so I just leave it alone and let it do its thing. One section of my yard is entirely wildflowers. Poppies, bachelor buttons, and black-eyed susans do especially well.
It makes my life easier to grow deer-resistant flowers in the beds, and most of the perennials have only been in place a couple of years so they’re still filling in. So far, this includes echinacea, daisies, Autumn joy sedum, peonies, red-hot pokers, globe allium, yarrow, and some type of small, incredibly bright purple asters that bloom from midsummer to autumn.
Hollyhocks pop up wherever they like. I love them, but they’ve become a little invasive. Hen-and-chicks were taking over one bed, so they were thinned and given to friends.
Our garden was an overgrown mess when we moved in, and it’s definitely a work in progress. Are gardens ever really finished?
