Popular Low Maintenance Color & Flowers This Summer

What are we seeing folks come and get this season?

Japanese maples have been a really hot item, which is one of the reasons we ran out and had to go get some more. A lot of dwarf shrubs. Everybody wants to not have to work.

Low maintenance has been pretty much the number one requirement. And then something that’s not going to get really large. So we have a couple of dwarf plants. One’s called a little quickfire hydrangea, and it only gets about four foot by four foot. And then we’ve got another really dwarf one called Bobo. Bobo is a pure white flower, and it only gets about three by three. And some hydrangeas are a lot of work.

There are seven families of hydrangeas. The ones that have to have shade are the ones that are a little bit more work. But there’s a lot of varieties of hydrangea that will grow very well in the full sun, and actually prefer the full sun. So whenever I recommend a hydrangea, sometimes people are like, ‘I don’t know, I haven’t had good luck.’ It was probably the variety that likes the shade, and it was probably planted in the sun.

So we will guide people when they come in. We ask them, how big is their area? What’s the length and width and feet of the flower bed we’re dealing with? And then we will actually take the plants and lay them out on the back drive in the shape and pattern that we’re going to have you plant them. And then we can try different things in there.

Say you want boxwoods as your backdrop. It’s your evergreen. It’s your anchor piece. Then we’ll take flowering stuff and kind of pull it forward in the bed. And in between those boxwoods, we’ll add the flowering material. If we try something and we don’t like it, we can put it back, grab something else, try that. And I think being able to do that really helps them visualize and see what we’re talking about. That is a picture worth more than a thousand words.

And I’ve noticed, too, a lot of things that have really been lately has been elongation of color, with the leaf color and stuff, because flowers aren’t going too last long. It doesn’t really matter what it is or what’s producing them. They really don’t. They just have their time.

Like lilacs this year, it was so cold and crummy when the lilacs bloomed. A lot of people didn’t even get to really see it and enjoy it. That is why the hydrangeas are so popular, because they bloom for some time in July all the way through frost. So they’re a single time bloomer, but for a very long period of time. Yeah, there are other items that do rebloom as well. They rebloom, but from what I’ve experienced is never as heavy as the initial bloom.

So like there’s a Weigela called a spilled wine, which it’s a purple leaf plant. Absolutely beautiful. Gets this like fuchsia trumpet shaped flower on it. And when it blooms at the end, end of spring, beginning of summer, it’s very heavy. It’s just loaded with flowers. And then it says it reblooms. Well, it sporadically throws flowers here and there. It’s not that heavy bloom that you saw initially all summer long.

It gets about three foot by three foot. It’s actually very compact. Then there’s another one called My Monet that stays really compact, another one called Bubbly Wine. That’s a yellow and green variegated foliage, it stays really compact. But with My Monet and the Bubbly Wine, you’ve got that variegated foliage. I don’t know who designed the series of Weigela, but there’s Wine and Roses, Bubbly Wine, Spilled Wine, and Fine Wine.

But this is something important when you come in. We’re going to ask you, do you have gravel or do you have mulch for your top? Wigilia are out if you have gravel, they will not take the reflective heat of gravel. It’ll cook the leaves right off of them. Even if there’s moisture in the ground, they just cannot bring that moisture up quick enough.

So again, we’re going to guide you, depending on what your specific situation is, to make sure you do it once and do it right.

Questions? Email us at [email protected] or call one of our two locations: Portage (330-499-0101) or Everhard (330-492-1243).