Blooming spectacular!

Last year I added blooming perennials to the front planting bed. To say they bloomed all summer — which they did — is impressive. These aren’t annuals after all, expected to bloom like crazy throughout their short life. But to say they thrived in a planting bed on the baking west side, with about the worst soil of any of my beds, during a drought — now that’s something.

The front of my house is a hundred feet from a road with a fifty miles-per-hour speed limit. It takes a major splash of color to even get noticed. Last summer, notice was mine.
I had heard about Gaillardia “Oranges and Lemons” long before I bought my plants. A friend told me it was her new favorite plant, since it kept producing beautiful painted blooms all season long. Garden Design magazine named it one of its “Way Hot 100” plants for 2006. That same year, the University of Georgia Trial Garden in Athens reported “Oranges and Lemons” bloomed from planting into winter.

We’re not talking about a couple blooms — plant catalogs advertise up to seventy-five two-inch tangerine and yellow blooms at one time. I am certain I won’t ever see seventy-five blooms on a plant in my garden, but I was quite happy with the number my one-gallon container plants produced for months. Each bloom has a yellow center ringed in a deep tangerine, radiating to tangerine petals tipped in yellow. The blooms on the eighteen-inch plant are visible at a distance, and the soft yellows and oranges contrast beautifully with a deep green holly background.

Gaillardias are summer flowers, adding bright colors to the garden and laughing at the heat. This member of the aster family has thirty species, although almost all available in nurseries are hybrids and cultivars developed by breeders. Gaillardias, also known as blanket flowers, are associated with the Plains and the Rockies, but are adaptable to Southeast humidity, coastal salt spray, and the heat of Zone 9. What they cannot tolerate are wet conditions. As long as they have plenty of sun and good drainage, Gaillardias will be covered with bright, patterned blooms all summer, attracting both attention and butterflies.

Although gaillardias are perennial, they are short-lived, lasting about three years in a flower border. Species Gaillardias reseed, providing replacements as plants age, but replace patented varieties with new plants from your local nursery when aging plants start to diminish.