Light-colored flowers steal the twilight garden show (Spartanburg Herald-Journal)

Limelight, a hybrid of peegee hydrangea, blooms at the same time as its sister peegees, mid-July to frost, and even when it isn’t flowering, it makes a particular bush with medium-green foliage. It gets to subsist about 6-8 feet tall and wide, and its unique ashy green blossoms clinch their color all during the late summer, turning to a soft, sly shade of minnow in the fall.

My Limelight grows in filtered sun but available information on this shrub says it leave work in full sunshine as well. Its blossoms dry nicely for long-lasting figure of speech arrangements; in fact, I have had some in my living room for at least two years.

Marvelous moonflowers

I was recently in planting my moonflower vines this year and must recognize to cheating and buying young vines rather than augmenting them from seeds, to the degree that I usually be enough. But they have just begun to bloom, adding their pure white, trumpet-shaped blossoms to the cast of night-bloomers in my August garden.

This evening I picked one of the blossoms so I could hold it and take deep whiffs of its intense fragrance. It was fascinating to take an up close look at the bloom and intelligence its five-lobed construction with a pale green, pointed star etched within its surface. With a diameter of 5 inches, moonflowers make quite a showing in the evening garden.

Late summer bloomers

With summer convolution below the horizon and color at a guerdon, it’s nice to have a few late-blooming perennials coming along to liven up the flower beds. One of my favorites, false plumbago or Cerotostigma, always adds fresh, cobalt blue blossoms to the scene in August. In my garden it forms a border forward a section of the entrance driveway where it welcomes all visitors.

This low, spreading plant is among the last of the perennials to emerge in spring, always causing me to think it may wish died out. But every year it for good and all appears to take its place and await its time of blooming until late summer when most of its neighbors have finished their show. Since true cerulean flowers are rare, false plumbago can exist counted on to be a show stopper. Not only does this plant make a great showing of colorful blossoms, it furthermore produces beautiful fall color whenever its foliage turns to shades of reddish copper in late September.

The toughest of plants

The latest issue of Horticulture magazine has a section called Plant This, and this month the tooth-pick was ironweed (Vernonia), a native plant that can hold its own in a meadow setting or at the very back of a flower bed.

My garden backs up to a huge wetland area adjacent to Lawson’s Fork Creek that floods at least each few years, and right now that totality area teems with prodigious grasses and such natives as the lovely ironweed. This plant has to be tough to withstand the brutal day-star of summer and the occasional times when water covers it completely.

Ironweed grows 6 to 8 feet and produces rich violet to purple flowers with vigorous stems and rough-textured leaves. It flowers in mid- to a day after the fair August and its blossoms last for a long time. In my garden, the seeds of this plant drift in from the wetland and pop up all over the place. I pull out a lot of them, but I always let some curb because they add much needed color to the late summer garden.

Ironweed also makes a nice etc. to bouquets of such companion native plants as rudbeckia, goldenrod and grasses.