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| Photo Credit: Lane Greer |
| Gladiolus blooms come in a wide range of colors and brighten both garden and home. | It’s always nice to receive a gigantic vase of cutflowers, but even better is when those blooms come from your own back yard! Easy to grow and with a good vase life to boot, the following plants will keep you bloomin’ happy all summer long – whether you’re in the garden or your living room.Gladiolus (Gladiolus × hortulanus). Glads are grown as annuals north of Zone 7. My mother always called this the funeral flower, but the plant has finally outgrown this bleak reputation. Its blooms are great because they come in lots of colors like purple, green, red, orange, white, yellow and many shades of pink and salmon. (And salmon is such a hard color to find for the garden!) The flowers last a long time in the vase if you cut or buy them just as the bottommost buds are starting to open. For midsummer blooms, gladiolus corms should be planted in spring, just after the first frost-free date. But continue planting corms about every two or three weeks to get flowers all summer long. These plants need full sun and grow 2-3 feet tall. Place them alongside other big plants like Shasta daisies (Leucanthemum × superbum) and Mexican bush sage (Salvia leucantha). Sunflowers (Helianthus annuus). What a sunny disposition these flowers have! From Van Gogh’s time to the present, sunflowers have always engendered happy feelings. There are over 100 cultivars of sunflowers that make great cutflowers. Try ‘Teddy Bear’, which has a head full of rich yellow petals on plants that are only a foot tall. Kids also like the humongous heads like those found on ‘Mammoth Grey Stripe’. My favorites are the reds like ‘Red Sun’, ‘Claret’ and ‘Velvet Queen’. It’s easy to find a mix of colors in seed packages. And because they have large seeds, sunflowers are easy for children (and grown-ups) to plant. These beauties just need a sunny spot in the garden, with enough room to accommodate their mature size.
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