Late Summer and Fall Plants | Egan Gardens of Salem, Oregon

Autumn is finally being recognized as a great time for gardening. The weather has cooled after the hot summer, and it's often more pleasant than during spring's windy drizzle and threat of frost. Our selection of fall plants has grown considerably in the last few years.

Fall Magic — Most notable is the addition of the Fall Magic line of plants. "Fall Magic" planters and hanging baskets are colorful combinations of fall flowering, cold tolerant plants and colorful-leaved perennials that keep their foliage all winter. As a few annuals in them die out, the perennials fill in. They look good all winter, and really great in early spring when it's still too cold for your usual annual baskets. This concept is being perfected by the very smart people of the Proven Winners plant breeding group, and we at Egan Gardens are having fun with it. We'll have a bunch of combinations already made for you; or if you prefer to make your own, you'll find a big selection of plants to work with.

Fall Magic flowering plants include strawflowers, African daisies, trailing verbenas, Million Bells and Superbells calibrachoas, and diascias. The best foliage plants are the colorful Heucheras and Euphorbias, along with gold and cream-edged ivy and vinca, creeping jenny and ajuga. Once you work in pansies and violas, you've got color throughout the cool months of the year.

The first Pansies of fall — We think fall is the best time to plant Pansies and Violas, since you get a whole extra season out of them that way. The first crop will be plantable around August 15th and there will be more crops to follow all the way 'til we close in mid-October. The color range is huge, and they're so darned cute.

Garden Mums — So many colors, so many shapes! Their flowers come in shades of deep, rusty red, bronzy-orange, yellow, white, lavender, purple and salmon. The puffy, double "decorative" flowers are the most common form, but there are also button-flower types, daisy forms and ones where the petals roll into quills or spoons. The Belgian mums are thick-growing, small flowered kinds that are like old-fashioned "cushion" mums. They work wonderfully big tubs and have shown good winter hardiness. The early varieties should be starting to bloom around mid-August, and there will be new ones popping out until early October.

Perennials — Japanese Anemones, Asters, Bluebeard (Caryopteris), Turtlehead (Chelone), Helenium, and Ox Eye Daisy (Heliopsis) bloom from August into October.