I can’t count the number of times people tell me that they like perennials, and then go on to say, “They certainly make a great show in early summer, but of course it’s all over by July.” They’re thinking of that wonderful (I almost said outrageous) display put on in June when everything seems to happen at once, with irises, oriental poppies, and peonies all exploding into color. Well, it’s true; if the Big Three of early summer were all they had in their gardens, then it would largely be plain old green for the rest of the season.

I want to show you that a perennial flower garden can unfold month by lovely month through the summer and still delight you with its offerings in fall. I’m not saying that the late summer garden is going to be a riot of color (I once heard a lecturer say that he was not in favor of riots anywhere, least of all in his garden). The color will not rival the main summer show (you could drown in color in June and July), nor should it. The late summer garden is another country; it has a quiet, gentle, almost contemplative quality.

The flowers that have bloomed all summer can begin to look a little tired, and the whole garden could use an infusion of fresh forms and colors. This takes a bit of planning, but I have my sights set on September and beyond. For the color and interest I want in my garden at that time of year, I have to consider three groups of perennials:

• Late by design: Plants that are not expected to bloom, and do not bloom, until late August, September, and—in a few cases—October

• Second chances: Perennials that bloom earlier in the summer and that will, if cut down in time, respond with a completely new flush of both foliage and flowers.

• The workhorses: Garden stalwarts that just keep on keeping on throughout the season. Most need a little help from their friends, however, and that’s going to be you.

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.

Right up there with the big showstoppers of early summer, there are beautiful perennials that are almost as spectacular, fully as lovely, and that have, in addition, the potential to bloom again later in the year.

Take the most spectacular of all, often called the queen of the June border— delphinium. Garden parties are planned to coincide with its flowering (unfortu­nately, so are early summer rainstorms). For two or three weeks delphinium crowns the border and when the flowers fade it seems unlikely that after such a splendid show the plant could do anything but rest until another year.

But have faith. Cut down the flower stalks, keeping an eye on the foliage below. It is losing much of its vigor and beginning to look dull and tired, but move the old leaves aside and you will see fresh bright leaf buds rising from the crown. This is the point at which I remove the old leaves, cultivate around the plant, and then water, adding liquid fertilizer.

What this plant then does in my garden seems a miracle to me. It throws up a mound of new leaves as if spring were starting all over again, and after a few weeks follows it up with another flowering. This time the stems are shorter than before, but I can’t complain. To have those colors back in August and September is a blessing.

Although many perennials can be encouraged to bloom again, relatively few will respond as the delphinium does, by throwing up a completely new flush of foliage as well as flowers, but globe thistle (Echinops ritro) is one. If you cut off the flower heads as they mature and turn dusty gray, you will be rewarded by fresh steel-blue flowers, which are far more attractive anyway.

Soon the supply of flowers will come to an end and the foliage, like that of delphinium, will lose vigor and begin to turn brown. Cut off the old leaves and reveal the bright new leaves bursting from the crown. Water, feed, and stand back, for here comes a brand new plant—leaves, flowers and all, only a little shorter than the earlier one, and most welcome in late summer.

Shasta daisy, perennial cornflower, yarrow, and false hollyhock (Sidalcea) are among others that can be cut back severely to encourage new leaves and flowers.

A small plant that needs this treatment but that poses a special problem is ‘Silver Mound’ (Artemisia schmidtiana). Being an artemisia, it’s grown for its tight little mound of foliage, and not for its flowers. Just about the time that the unattractive mustard-colored flowers appear, the stems splay out from the center and the delightful mound shape is lost. It should be cut down at this stage or, better still, just before this stage. It then begins a fresh burst of silver-gray leaves and it will be a true silver mound again in a few weeks.

But there is an awkward hiatus. Whereas the bigger plants further back in the border are decently concealed by neighboring plants while they’re making their second growth, ‘Silver Mound’, at a height usually under twelve inches, is at the very front of the border. I grow my plants so close together that I can usually persuade a neighboring plant to lean over the cut-down ‘Silver Mound’ until it begins to grow back. Once it was a blue flax that obliged in this way; another time, a small catmint. Actually, “persuade” is not quite the right word; what I do is to nudge the neighboring plant over a little and push in twigs to hold it, and then draw some flowering stems over the top of the temporarily bald ‘Silver Mound’.

At first, when I was nervous about the possible effects of my ministrations, I cut down the back half of the plant and fluffed up the front to hide it. When the new growth was a few inches high, I cut the front.

I have students who still can’t bear to do the whole operation in one fell swoop. I can’t blame them. As a matter of fact, it’s not a bad way to approach any drastic job on a plant you don’t yet know well. Try out your technique on the back of the plant, and watch what happens. New gardeners may feel better or, at least, not so bad about cutting down a plant if they understand that those old leaves are no longer useful to it. The plant has finished with them; their work has now been taken over by the young foliage.

When these cutback plants come into their second round of foliage and bloom they tend to be shorter than they were first time around. This is something I take into account when planning the sequence of bloom in the border. I find it provides me with a good opportunity to make new and interesting color combinations partway through the season. The globe thistle that paired well with the tall ligularia ‘The Rocket’ in late June and early July becomes a partner for a pink coneflower in August and September, when the ligularia is nothing more than brown seed heads on dry stalks. Delphinium that rose above the peonies and poppies of June is now of a height to associate easily with the second bloom of Achillea ‘Moon­shine’. It’s an endlessly fascinating game, with as many plays as there are gardeners.

The plants are all out there, in mail-order and local nurseries. All it takes is some advance study of perennials and their blooming times, judicious and timely mail-ordering (I know it’s hard to think September when you’re writing orders in January, but do it anyway), and visits to local nurseries at regular intervals to see what’s available.

So many garden enthusiasts rush round to the local nurseries on that First Day of Spring and assume that after that the nurseries disappear until the First Day of Spring of the next year. Wrong! They’re putting out plants, week by week, right through the season. And remember, when the last pack of marigolds has been sold, they have a lot more time to answer your questions about perennials.

In my September garden, the plants designed to bloom late provide some of the strongest elements, for many of them are relatively large, and some have commanding and dramatic presence. Something else they bring to the late garden is a freshness and a newness that enliven a scene that has by now become familiar. This is what creates the excitement in a perennial flower garden, the sense that there is always more to come and that every day will bring change.

If you couldn’t name any other flowers that typify autumn in the garden, I’m sure you could come up with “aster.” As a child, I knew these in England (where I would have liked them better if they hadn’t signaled the beginning of the school year). We called all of them Michaelmas daisies (pronounced mickle-muss), for they were the flowers that bloomed at the time of St. Michael’s Mass, the end of the third quarter of the year. In this country, they are listed as New England asters (Aster novae-angliae) and New York asters (A. novi-belgi).

Asters are marvelous flowers because no one of their rich and glowing colors is incompatible with another. I think of them as stained-glass colors, an association with harvest festivals in the local church, where they were massed against the altar rail.

In size, these asters range from twelve-inch dwarfs to towering five- and six-footers. Back in fashion now, and recognized for the beauties they are, they were at one time thought of as commonplace and undesirable. Well, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder, and the beholders of that time were dazzled by the novelty of the newly imported exotics of the Victorian era. Unappreciated in their native land, these North American asters were snatched up by British plant hunters, who took them back to England and hybridized them.

I have three particularly good performers in my garden. Aster novae-angliae ‘Alma Potschke’, has a glowing rose-red flower, blooming from August to the end of September. Aster novi-belgi ‘Eventide’, is a September bloomer of deep purple with a yellow center. Aster novae-angliae ‘Harrington’s Pink’, the tallest and latest of all, is a magnet for butterflies and bees well into October.

Japanese anemone pairs well with asters. One of the hardier ones, Anemone vitifolia ‘Robustissima’, holds its silvery pink flowers in an airy candelabrum that shows to advantage against the denser flowers and leaves of the aster ‘Eventide’. Just because I’m anxious to have late color doesn’t mean I want to put up with miserable-looking foliage all summer, so I really appreciate the handsome grapelike leaves of these anemones. They take their time appearing in spring, and they’re a bit wayward about where they emerge, but whenever and wherever they do, they’re always welcome in my garden.

The most elegant of all the Japanese anemones is a pure white that rejoices in the lovely name of ‘Honorine Jobert’. It’s a little harder to bring through severe winters and will sometimes bloom so late that an early frost nips the petals and turns them brown. But what other flowers have this delicacy and sheen to them, and where else can you find such glistening white and such silvered pink at this late date? I marvel when I pass them, and I’m grateful.

There are some thrilling dark blues in the September garden. One of them, with hooded, almost sinister, flowers (and which is, in fact, extremely poisonous in all its parts), is Aconitum carmichaelii, the purplish blue monkshood. The flowers are so dark that they photograph poorly; as an ideal companion offering a background that shows it up, I have the tall aster ‘Harrington’s Pink’, with the Japanese anemone ‘Honorine Jobert’ beside it.

A lovely deep “true” blue is provided by Salvia grandiflora pitcheri. The tubular, lipped flowers are borne on two- to three-foot stems, which either flop about aimlessly or collapse on the ground. I can’t bear to see such wands staked, so I plant this salvia close to, almost on top of, a Japanese anemone and draw the long stems up through the anemone foliage. The silvery pink and rich blue make a lovely combination.

I’ve noticed visitors stop and stare, then finger one of the blue flowers and try to trace it down to see where it comes from. The basal foliage is wretched, and, in my opinion, just as well hidden. In my own defense, I must say that it doesn’t seem to suffer from being smothered down there among the leaves of more robust plants.

Salvia is a big genus. From the southern and western United States and Mexico come many salvias that are wonderful in fall. I know, because I’ve seen them in gardens in Zone 6 and southward. Not in mine, alas.

There’s nothing like purple for richness in the late garden. The native joe-pye weed (Eupatorium purpureum) is a common sight in the wild, and there is now a German cultivar named ‘Gateway’ that is part of a favorite trio in my garden. ‘Gateway’ has purple flower heads, but even more attractive are its purple stems. Next to this is a six-foot Angelica gigas, a most dramatic plant with huge alliumlike domes of purple, starry flowers and, again, purple stems. To the front of these is a white baneberry (Actaea pachypoda), a native you’ve probably seen on walks in the woods. For much of the year it’s not an eye-catcher, but in fall—with clusters of dead-white berries and a purple-black dot at the tip of each—it justifies its popular name, doll’s-eyes.

Grown in the half shade against a birch wood, what a trio these plants make! As if the color were not enough, in a certain light their purple stems almost disappear and the flowers seem to float, lending an air of mystery to the autumn scene.

There are two late-blooming plants whose bright color might be welcome among these somber purples. Physostegia ‘Vivid’ is a cultivar of the familiar native, obedient plant, or false dragonhead, but ‘Vivid’ blooms considerably later, in a vibrant rose pink, so aptly described in its name. Chelone obliqua, the most ornamental of the turtleheads, offers bright rose purple flowers. Both plants do well in moderate shade, though they can take full sun as long as there is sufficient moisture.

If there is one color that is abundant (some might say relentless) at the end of summer, it is yellow. A lot of this color comes from flowers that are so much a part of this time of year that they are either taken for granted and barely noticed, or scorned and dismissed as boring. Perhaps it is true that familiarity breeds contempt.

In the past, I was not very charitable in my opinion of goldenrod, or the ubiquitous ‘Golden Glow’. I think there’s a good reason for that. I associated goldenrod with the bedraggled plants I used to see growing on London bomb sites during World War II—it was not a cheery sight. Similarly, ‘Golden Glow’, neither golden nor glowing, but barely surviving in sour soil at the foot of some area steps, did nothing to lift my spirits. But both of them look wonderful in the clearer, sunnier North American autumn. Why not? This is their own, their native land.

When I first came across ‘Golden Glow’, I didn’t recognize it. I was out looking for flowers to brighten the dim interior of an old barn that was to be the scene of a wedding party. With one day to go to the wedding and panic setting in, I was driving along a back road, when against an old shed I saw this wonder, a huge bush of brilliant yellow flowers. When I went to the nearby farmhouse and asked the owner if I could have some, she was more than generous. “What, that old yellow daisy?” she said, “have it all, before it takes the shed down with it.”

I filled a milk churn, barrels, and even old sap buckets with these golden flowers, and the interior of the barn came to life. Clipping some of the flowers to six-inch stems, I filled enough jelly jars for the length of all the trestle tables. ‘Golden Glow’ had to be our candles, for a naked flame was out of the question in that dry barn.

Hybridizers have been at work on both these golden beauties (you see, I’m quite converted), developing plants of more manageable size, better suited to today’s gardens. I have a most becoming little goldenrod in my garden, Solidago ‘Golden Fleece’. It grows to a mound no more than two feet tall and two feet across with compact, bright yellow flowers, attractive broad leaves, and none of the legginess associated with the taller, old goldenrods.

I looked up ‘Golden Glow’, and found it under Rudbeckia laciniata ‘Horten-sia’, where it was described as invasive and largely replaced in gardens by the superior Rudbeckia nitida ‘Goldquelle’. Of course! That must be the plant I’ve enjoyed every September for years. It’s growing next to an amethyst sea holly whose prickly, metallic flower heads show to great advantage against ‘Goldquelle’s’ shaggy yellow heads.

I’m sure there are countless gardens in late summer full of sunflowers, sneeze­ weed, tickseed, gloriosa daisies, golden marguerites, and bright yellow chrysanthe­mums. It must be a jolly sight, but I can well believe it might pall after a year or two. It’s not just that so many of the late summer flowers are yellow, but that they tend to be daisies or daisy look-alikes. Most are fibrous-rooted, fast-growing, and large at maturity, and the yellow they sport is frequently assertive.

I hang around nurseries and garden centers quite a bit, and I’m fascinated by some of the things I hear. A common question in late summer is: “Do you have anything that’s not a yellow daisy?” Well, of course they do, and plenty of them.

We’ve already considered some purples and blues. If you like bold combina­tions, just imagine what a purple aster such as ‘Eventide’ or the dark blue monks­hood could do for gloriosa daisies or any of the family of black-eyed Susans.

If these combinations are a little too much for you, you can turn with relief to the interesting whites of late summer. There is one plant I have grown for many years and which I now regard as the unsung hero of the late garden. It comes through drought, wet, and wind.

Let me introduce you to Boltonia asteroides ‘Snowbank’, a cultivar of a plant native to the eastern and central. United States. ‘Snowbank’ grows into a bush from three to five feet tall, studded with small daisylike flowers in fall. I’m a fan of this plant, as you can tell. In the first place, its gray-green leaves are a gentle presence in the border all summer long; and second, it never needs staking.

‘Snowbank’ is so strong, indeed, that it often serves to hold up the weaker brethren. I’ve seen it after a storm standing like a rock, with plants fallen into it from all sides. There is a pink form, too, Boltonia ‘Pink Beauty’, recently made available; it is lovely, blooming a little earlier than ‘Snowbank’, but don’t look to it for strength, because it is a lax grower and needs support.

Spires of flowers can give a lift to any border, and white spires are particularly dramatic in fall. Snakeroot, or bugbane (Cimicifuga racemosa), is a native that blooms in early to midsummer, but for really late bloom, Cimicifuga simplex ‘The Pearl’ is the snakeroot to have. Blooming in October, ‘The Pearl’, like the white Japanese anemone, runs the risk of damage from early frost, but it’s so lovely that I’m prepared to take that risk. It has given me glistening, bottlebrush flowers for five years out of seven, and in the other two, I simply cut off the frosted brown spikes and enjoyed the foliage.

For more white, there’s Artemisia lactiflora that begins to bloom in August. This one is not what we expect of artemisias. It is grown for its flowers and has undistinguished dark green leaves. The airy sprays of greenish white flowers at a height of four to five feet are attractive toward the back of the border and contrast effectively with more substantial flower forms such as asters and heleniums.

So much for the tall whites, but there are whites for the front of the border, too. I count on garlic chives (Allium tuberosum) for a refreshing white in August. The leaves are straplike, in a bright green that’s pleasing all through the summer. The flowers are scintillating balls of white, but before that there are the buds, and what buds! I think the beauty of some buds exceeds anything the open flowers have to offer.

These slim, sharply pointed, tightly wrapped promises are just translucent enough to suggest how intricately the florets must be folded and crumpled inside. The buds don’t all open at once, so there will be both buds and flowers on the plant at the same time. After more than a month of flowers, the seed heads on their strong stems remain a handsome feature in the border, though some garden­ers dread the proliferation of seedlings.

For the front edge of the flower, bed there is a low-growing white daisy (Chyrsanthemum weyrichii), whose thick lustrous leaves almost qualify it as a ground cover. It must be grown in full sun to flower. Don’t make the mistake I did with this latest of all fall bloomers. It was in sun when I planted it in May but by late August it was in shade most of the day, and of course needed another six weeks of sun to bring on the flowers. Once moved to a spot that guaranteed sun, it bloomed in mid-October for two years out of three. I admit this is stretching late-season blooms to the limit, but I love to see those white daisies, some of them fading to pink, among the brilliant fallen leaves.

Seeing what an ornament the wild clematis was, clambering over bushes and through the grass around the pond, I planted a sweet autumn clematis (Clematis paniculata) to cover some old posts in the garden. It certainly did what it was supposed to; every year for years it covered itself with sweet-smelling, starry flowers in October. Later its name was changed by edict, so I did The Right Thing. After all, I told myself, I have students in the garden every summer and I have to show them I know what’s what. So I pulled out the by-now almost illegible old label and put in a spanking new one. “Clematis maximowicziana,” it said. That winter, the poor thing died. Too much for it, I suppose. Grow it without a label; you’ll love it.

I count the pond’s edge planted with white iris as part of my garden, but there is a wildness there that can surprise and delight me. One September, wild clematis with quaint names—virgin’s bower, traveler’s joy, old man’s beard—trailed out from the surrounding woodland to the edge of the pond. Magically, the deep blue flowers of bottle gentian appeared at the same time. There they were—a colony of Gentiana andrewsii, little blue bottles in a sea of clematis stars, the water giving the picture back in reflection. Now there was a pure gift—no strings attached. But I could take inspiration from it, and I did. I planted a late monkshood of the same mysterious blue at the base of my autumn clematis.

I’m writing about gentians and monkshood here, in a section on white flowers, because I cannot think of any flower in isolation; I visualize each as part of a small garden scene and, if one is a newcomer to my garden, in a scene I must create. This is where my happiness in gardening lies.