There is a group of perennials that provide late summer color. These are the workhorses of the garden, many of which have sustained the borders with their color since early summer, either steadily or sporadically. I’m thinking of such stalwarts as coneflower, blanketflower, salvia, veronica, summer aster, campanula. If you don’t want these plants to look like leftovers by the end of August, you must take care of them throughout the season.

Deadheading is of prime importance. I don’t like to use the word “chore” for any garden work, but that’s what this is, a chore. By preventing the formation of seed, you will greatly improve the quantity and quality of flowers to come, to say nothing of smartening up the plant. Don’t think of it as merely deadheading, or “pulling the heads off flowers.”

If you approach the job thoughtfully, you’ll see that it’s almost like pruning. By careful cutting in the right places, you can encourage the plant to branch, thus improving its whole shape, just as you would a shrub or tree. These are only herbaceous perennials, of course, but why not have them looking as beautiful as possible.

Next in order of importance come all the rest of those jobs involved in keeping a flower garden growing and looking good. I lump them together for a reason. In my closely planted borders, a certain amount of maneuvering is needed to get into the middle. Once in, I’d better take advantage of the opportunity to do a thorough check. From this vantage point, I see things that were not visible from the edge of the border.

Bending down to lift a stem and support it with a twig or stake, I see a few weeds. They’re small, but I pull them anyway, except for one, a dandelion. No use breaking it off at the soil level; that long-taprooted thing calls for a deep weeder. I get the feeling that this patch of garden is very dry, so I dig down an inch or so to check for moisture. I squash a Japanese beetle. Come to think of it, doesn’t this part of the garden look a bit “off”? Nothing actually dying or diseased or anything as drastic as that, just not vigorous and fresh-looking. I respond to that by aerating the soil carefully between the plants. I could use a hand fork but I rely on a scuffle hoe, a wonderful tool, and my favorite.

Now all this could involve four or five trips to fetch tools and supplies, plus four or five scrambles in and out of the border. I know, because that’s how I worked at first (it’s sadly true that “we get too soon old and too late smart,” but I do like to think there’s been some improvement).

So here’s the lesson of this: get your tools and other supplies together first, and while you’re about it see that the hose is connected and handy, so you can water afterward as needed. Take them into the border with you and set them down as close as possible to where you’re going to make a start, so you can just reach your hand out and get what you need. I say the minimum equipment you should have handy is: hand fork, deep weeder, scuffle hoe, twigs and stakes, twine, clippers, and a bucket or basket for weeds and clippings.

If I were handing out prizes, I’d have to begin with summer aster (Aster x frikartii), quite different from the New England asters of fall. This one begins to bloom in June and goes on right through the season until cut down by severe frost in October. For all the toughness that its performance suggests, A. X frikartii is almost delicate in appearance, growing in a gentle, shapely mound, covered with yellow-centered lavender daisies. Why the prize? Each flower, as it dies, shrivels and disappears beneath the foliage—no deadheading. First prize!

Catmint is another plant that requires a minimum of attention. I find that in the borders of my wide open garden, the big catmint (Nepeta ‘Six Hills Giant’) looks best. It blooms right up to frost and be­yond. I have a choice; I can shear it for new bloom on a more compact plant, or leave it as an informal, billowing, mound. Either way, it still sends up flowers. What I do depends on where it’s growing and on its relationship to neigh­boring plants, which changes from year to year.

Blanketflower (Gaillardia aristatd) and purple coneflower (Echinacea purpurea) are two plants that look better tidied up, but that will continue blooming even without this housekeeping. I like to leave a few seed heads on some of the tallest stems.

I would put Salvia x superba ‘East Friesland’ among the top ten performers for both color and long period of bloom. Purple flower spikes rise above clumps of grayish green foliage. Like those of many of the salvias, the flowers are surrounded by bracts, these of a reddish purple. So lovely are their colors and shapes that I usually leave them for several weeks, cutting them back only when the rich color has completely faded. They bloom anew later in the season.

Spike speedwell (Veronica spicata) makes my list, too, either in white (‘Icicle’) or in a rich rose (‘Red Fox’). Both are long-blooming. Sheared in midsummer, they will send up new flowers, a few at a time. A smaller veronica (V. incana) has flowers in pink or purple, but they are not the reason for growing the plant, which is valued more for its silver-gray leaves. I take shears to these when they begin to look tatty, and they quickly grow back.

I’ve saved two of my list of stalwarts until last because they’re such a nuisance; but they are lovely things and I can’t seem to do without them. I like all campanulas; unfortu­nately, the one I like best is an alarming seeder and—as if this weren’t enough— a perfect misery to deadhead. Peach bells (Campanula persicifolia), in blue or white, first bloom in June but can be kept in flower after that by scrupulous deadheading. The job calls for nail scissors (cuticle scissors, even) with blades sharp-pointed and narrow enough to cut off one faded bell at a time without getting the bud that’s alongside it. As I write this, I’ve decided it must go, but I think I say this every year.

Threadleaf tickseed (Coreopsis verticillata) is a deadheading problem too. The best, ‘Moonbeam’, is covered with pale yellow daisies by the hundred. ‘Zagreb’, has bright yellow daisies in similar numbers. Three-foot ‘Grandiflora’, has the brightest flowers of all. None is possible to deadhead, or so I find, and the presence of brown and withered flowers among the yellow is most unattractive.

The redoubtable Fred McGourty may have the solution. Pushed for an answer to the question of how to deal with this, he suggested shearing it right back and leaving on vacation for two or three weeks. I may have to try that.

I see that nowhere in these three groups of color providers have I mentioned phlox or daylilies, and both play a big role in my garden. There isn’t a lot to say here about hemerocallis because, except for the removal of spent flowers every day, they come very close to being no-maintenance plants.

What I do want to say is that it’s worth taking the trouble to seek out cultivars that bloom late in the year. I notice that it comes as a surprise to visitors to see daylilies heavily budded in September. I have three beautiful multibranched, small-flowered October bloomers—a rose red, an apricot, and a near-orange. Obviously, at this point I ought to reel off their names, but I can’t: I bought them when they caught my eye at a nursery field many Septembers ago.

If you go to a daylily farm to buy plants, it will probably be some time in July, because that’s when there’s the most to see. Buy some, by all means, but don’t blow your whole daylily budget. Poke around and find the rows where the plants are just showing bud. Go back later, when they’re fully open, and make another selection. These will be the backbone of your late-summer and early-fall garden. If you’re buying daylilies by mail, read the fine print in the catalog and order some marked “L” (for late). Last piece of advice: label carefully or mark the varieties on your garden plan, so that you can do better than I do when admirers ask for their names.

For me, a garden could not be a summer garden without summer phlox. Phlox paniculata is a glory. Even these words on the page waft the scent toward me and give me visions of their color. For me, phlox is wrapped in associations which are hard to pin down—to think of where, of when, but overwhelming nevertheless. A garden in Gloucestershire? My grandfather’s? A four-year-old in a party dress (with wings, no less) lifted up and set down to smile for a snapshot beside a mass of phlox, the flowers at eye level and higher, and butterflies, everywhere. But there is no such snapshot. In my inherited collection of faded sepia prints, the nearest to that enchanted memory is a snapshot of me standing stiffly, in party regalia again (but, significantly, no wings this time), in the wrong garden, holding a stiff bunch of white daisies, and looking sullen. Of this garden, though it is documented on film, I have no recollection.

The phlox season in my garden begins with Phlox maculata ‘Miss Lingard’ (formerly P. Carolina), often called the wedding phlox (blooms in June, obviously). A week or two later, the traditional garden phlox, P. paniculata begins in earnest, and continues to bloom, sporadically, until the very last one of them all blooms in October.

I grow fourteen named phlox hybrids, in white, pink, salmon, red, orange, purple, and mauve. All are beautiful, all are sweetly scented, and each has its own subtle coloration. Lecture audiences enjoy seeing slides of phlox in beautiful color combinations, but their questions reveal considerable nervousness and anxiety. Their thoughts seem mainly on disease and disaster.

To questions of what I do about powdery mildew and how I deal with red spider mites, I can only answer: nothing. Lame, I know, but I must be honest. Mildew is nonexistent some years, slight in others, and, just once, it was truly awful. Some years, it would mar one phlox; other years another; but only once did it turn all of them, pristine ‘Miss Lingard’ included, into ugly sticks. My remedy that year was to cut them to the ground, cultivate, fertilize, and water. The foliage that grew back was clean, and the flowers, though late, were as lovely as ever. It did mean, however, that I had to do a lot of emergency moving of plants to camouflage the temporarily empty spaces.

I know the conventional solution given by respected professionals and it must have taken care of the mildew problem for them. All I can say is that for me it hasn’t. We are told to keep plants some distance apart for good circulation of air, to thin clumps to two or three shoots per plant, and to spray early in the season with a fungicide. One year, though, I had close-planted masses of phlox, with no mildew, while widely spaced plants in the nursery beds were turned white by it. So now you know exactly what to do, don’t you?

Occasionally, after lectures, in frustration at the sameness of questions about phlox, I have suggested Bakalar’s three steps for dealing with mildew. 1. Pretend you can’t see it (this lasts a day or two); 2. Pretend you like it— “Just look at the woolly white leaves on that phlox, how pretty” (good for another day or two); 3. Cut the whole darn thing down (problem solved: the next growth will be clean).

Presumably, all gardeners want the same thing for their phlox—strong plants, glorious colors, lustrous, healthy leaves and—one more thing—a long period of bloom. Careful deadheading can go a long way toward this.

Deadhead phlox in stages, from light cuttings to complete cutting down. Begin by removing small clusters of flowers as they fade; next, remove the whole panicle, or truss, cutting to the first leaf node below it. Lateral flower buds will appear at the node, and after they fade it is time to cut the stems all the way down to the base of the plant. You may choose to give soluble plant food at this stage, if you wish, but in any case aeration and careful watering will speed up rebloom.

It’s just as well to keep phlox deadheaded because they’re generous self-seeders, and the volunteers are often that undistinguished, muddy pink that people complain about, muttering darkly about their phlox plants “reverting to magenta.” The original plants don’t “revert,” but the seedlings are highly variable and a good many will be that unpopular color. Phlox bloom at different times, so with a good selection of cultivars there will be some in bloom at all times. The earliest bloomers for me (after ‘Miss Lingard’) are ‘Tenor’ (rose red) and ‘Starfire’ (orange red). Among the latest are ‘Eva Cullum’ (heavy wine pink) and ‘World Peace’ (white).

But wait, there is still one more to come. I found a budded phlox in an old garden, early one October. The petals were wrapped spiral fashion, in their buds. There was a glimpse of rich purple. The buds opened to small, pure white flowers with that same purple in the eye. I moved some into my garden. They have incredibly thick, strong stems and bloom so late that I don’t deadhead. In some years I have put the rest of the garden to bed in late October and left it for the winter, with that beautiful thing still blooming, still heavily budded. So, if you inherit an old garden, or visit an abandoned one, keep an eye open for one special phlox that may have survived over the years. Take a piece for your garden, by all means, but leave some for others.

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1. Growing Perennials in Your Garden

2. Growing Perennials in Your Garden – Second Chances

3. Growing Perennials in Your Garden – Late by Design

4. Top Five Hardy Perennials for Your Garden

5. Hardy Perennials Planting Tips

6. Color in the Garden – Learn How to Use Purple

7. The Basics of Garden Color

8. Growing Herbaceous Plants in Your Low-Maintenance Garden

9. Color in the Garden – Foliage

10. The Basics of Raising Perennials from Seed