Perennial chrysanthemums and asters have already bloomed in some people’s gardens, and those are plants many gardeners depend on to provide color as the days shorten in the fall.

Several people have asked me if that means we won’t have any fall flowers; if everything will have gone by and we will be left with foliage — some of it in its fall splendor — and nothing else.

“I don’t think so,” said Lois Berg Stack, an ornamental horticulture specialist with the University of Maine Cooperative Extension, when I posed the question to her.

“Every year you will see some rhododendron or some forsythia flower in the fall to extend the season, but that doesn’t affect the flowering of those plants the next spring.”

She thinks the early blossoming of some fall flowers is similar, and they will still have most of their blossoms around their regular time.

“I saw a goldenrod flower that I wouldn’t have expected to be in bloom at this time,” she said, “but it was just one stem and not the whole clump.”

That means the rest of the flower will come into bloom later on in the season, around its regular time.

Stack pointed out that the season has not been consistently warmer than normal. Although it was warm and bordering on hot in March, it was cold in May and rainy in June, followed by more hot weather in July.

“All of that together may have an impact,” she said. “Every flower is different, and it will impact each one differently.”

Stack has not heard of any problems with apples or other major crops, although several people did tell her they did not have a very good harvest of peas. And that was the case in our garden. Although I planted them several weeks earlier than normal, the first peas ripened only a week or so early, and they aged very quickly.

In addition, the strawberry season came early and went by before July 1 here in Cape Elizabeth.

Getting back to fall flowers, a number of reblooming plants should provide color as the days shorten.

Reblooming daylily “Stella d’Oro” and her siblings generally have a flush of blossoms in June and early July. If you deadhead the spent blossoms — and maybe even if you don’t — you usually will get a second run of blossoms in September that are often done in by the first frost. If the second flush of blooms on these plants comes a bit earlier this year, as they might because everything seems to be ahead of schedule, they could run their full course instead of being nipped by the frost.

These daylilies are rebloomers, not continuous bloomers. But Jeff O’Donal told members of the Maine Landscape and Nursery Association, which held its summer meeting earlier this month at his Gorham nursery, that a continuous-blooming daylily could be coming fairly soon.

O’Donal said that “Sarah Scally,” named for a woman who once worked for Barth Daylilies — a line that has its home at O’Donal’s — and who now works as assistant horticulturist at the Maine Department of Agriculture, blooms very early in the season, and was gorgeous on July 11. “She still looks amazing today,” he said.

Nick Barth, who took over the hybridization of Barth Daylilies from his father, Joseph, is using his success with that daylily to try to create a continuous bloomer.

Hydrangeas will also provide blooms late in the season. The “Endless Summer” series starts blooming in June and will still look good into late fall. And the “Paniculata Grandiflora” series bloom late as a white flower and turn to pink and bronze later in the fall. These blossoms stay on the plants right through the winter, so they will be providing a lot of late-season color.

There are also plants that bloom so late in the season in Maine that in some years, when there is an early frost, they don’t bloom at all. Hibiscus is an example.

Hibiscus is a confusing plant because there is a tropical hibiscus, a herbaceous perennial hibiscus and a shrub hibiscus.

The tropicals are treated as an annual in Maine, and can be gorgeous. They might bloom late in the season, but they’re essentially annuals in Maine, so they won’t rebloom next year. But they really are off-topic.

The hibiscus shrub, with the common name Rose of Sharon, is a very late bloomer. Our Rose of Sharon, a white variety, and our daughter’s, a pink variety, have had years where they did not bloom at all because frost kills the buds. But when they do, they are absolutely gorgeous.

We also have a herbaceous perennial hibiscus called “Clown” that blooms huge and pink in September, and is stunning. Late-blooming sedums — “Autumn Joy” is the most common one, but there are several others — will provide blooms in the fall. Lobelia is another wonderful late bloomer. 

And if you don’t have these late-blooming plants and your garden is all green shortly after Labor Day, there is a solution. Head out to your local garden center and buy some chrysanthemums, boltonias or asters — “Purple Dome” or whatever looks good — and put them in your garden.

If you buy them early, you will get to enjoy them longer. And no one needs to know that these flowers were not part of your plan all along.

Tom Atwell has been writing the Maine Gardener column since 2004. He is a freelance writer gardening in Cape Elizabeth and can be contacted at 767-2297 or at:

tomatwell@me.com

 

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