It came on suddenly – the realization that fall was here. Turning a corner in a friend’s garden earlier this month and seeing the yellow and red foliage on the native vine maple (Acer circinatum) was a pleasant alert. Oh, it’s happening. Typically, we don’t see much colorful fall foliage in October; often our best color is in November, and even into December, but autumn is certainly here. The days are noticeably shorter, and the hills have hardly any hint of tawny grasses of summer.
But the tired state of native habitats does not mean there is no flower color in the garden. The earliest bulbs, late-flowering perennials, certain succulents, and long-blooming shrubs can still be found flowering in summer-dry climate gardens. See our tips below.
~ Saxon Holt and Nora Harlow
October Blog Post: Maples in the West
Maples (genus Acer) are native to much of the temperate Northern Hemisphere, but their distribution within this wide geographic range is decidedly uneven. Of the roughly 120-130 species worldwide, more than 100 are found naturally in China and 24 in Japan.
Callistemon ‘Violaceus‘, Purple Bottlebrush, shown here with Muhlenbergia dubia at the U.C. Davis Arboretum, is a long-flowering Australian shrub that adds color to the fall landscape.
No matter which region of the summer-dry climate where you garden, there are all sorts of plants that might be in flower depending on your own supplemental irrigation and how hot the summer might have been. In the native landscapes of the West, we frequently will still see goldenrods, asters, and tarweeds, with salvia and epilobium still hanging on.
In the garden, there are any number of late-flowering perennials that can be coaxed into October bloom with some deadheading and supplemental water in the late summer, but there are others that don’t even start to become showy until autumn.
With a name like Sedum ‘Autumn Joy’ we should expect a good show in autumn. This tough succulent begins flowering in summer but colors up beautifully for fall. There is some confusion about its proper name: Hylotelephium spectabile ‘Autumn Joy’ seems to be the most accepted, but it’s sometimes found as Sedum telephium ‘Herbstfreude’.
Many sages come on strong in autumn, such as Salvia greggii which is even called autumn sage, but we have found pineapple sage (Salvia elegans) to be unexpectedly drought-tolerant and deer-proof. This shrubby perennial will need supplemental irrigation for the spectacular fall flower shown in the photo above in the Garden of Fragrance at the San Francisco Botanical Garden flowering alongside pungent Tagetes lemmonii. However, it gets through an entire hot summer in my garden, sparsely flowering with monthly watering.
In summer-dry climates, bulbs can be dependable flowers, going dormant in the summer and returning with winter rains. Some, like Narcissus deficiens and Scilla autumnalis, come up quickly as delicate flowers as soon as first rain arrives. Others, such as these autumn daffodils, Sternbergia lutea (below), put up foliage first, as do the cyclamen we see next to them.
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Saxon Holt is a photojournalist and sole photographer of more than 30 garden books, including the award winning books Plants and Landscapes for Summer-Dry Climates, The American Meadow Garden, and Hardy Succulents. He is the Director of the Summer-Dry Project, a Fellow of the Garden Writers Association, and owner of the PhotoBotanic Garden Library.
