Let Fresh Backyard Landscaping Bring Fall Color into Your Life
by Wendy Croix
wendy.croix@homeimprovementideas.net
Home Improvement Ideas Columnist
If your beautiful backyard has turned into an overgrown tangle or a burned out wasteland, let these fall beauties refresh your landscaping and your spirit. Add these eye-catching flowers and ornamentals and give yourself a whole new point of view.
Fall flowers brighten your backyard
Old standbys can be combined with a fresh new iris (yes, iris!) to remind you that fall doesn't have to be the end of your flower season:
- Asters: Boost your backyard's color potential with vivid pinks, blues, or purples, or add a sea of white. Either way, these hearty, easy to grow plants offer reliable blooms.
- Mums: If your fall landscaping idea runs to the traditional bronzes and golds, then mums should be your choice, either in powerful color spots or masses of color.
- Reblooming irises: The term "Cycle rebloomers" designates the new varieties of iris that boom both in the spring and in the fall, so if you prefer the delicacy of lacy iris to the more substantial mums and asters, here's your sweet-scented landscaping answer. One, the aptly named Immortality, reblooms as far north as Zone 3. That's right. Fall iris in Minnesota and Montana. Who knew!
Ornamentals add interest to your backyard landscaping
Spectacular ornamental vegetables and grasses can revive your ailing backyard landscaping. Try these surefire colorful additions to your garden:
- Kale: Beautiful shades of purple make this cabbage-like plant a fall favorite for borders and pots as well.
- Ornamental peppers: Another colorful replacement for garden flowers, the pepper revives the bright, bright reds you thought you lost when your annuals died.
- Ornamental grasses: Add height and color to your backyard with grasses. The three foot burgundy stems of Ornamental flame grass turn golden as fall progresses. Chinese silver grass (Bitsy Ben) grows showy four to five foot plumes in autumn colors. Little bluestem offers two to four foot clumps of blue foliage while bluish switch-grass grows taller.
Whether it's a pot garden of purple kale and ivy or a corner garden of grasses and mums, your fall backyard landscaping will bring color back to your life.
About the Author
Wendy Croix, Ph.D. is a creative writer, freelancer, and self-confessed home improvement junkie. She's also a professor with more than twenty years’ experience in the field of education.
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