Flower Gardens
Annuals and perennials spice the landscape with their colorful flowers and foliage. Beds of color provide brilliant accents against backgrounds of permanent plantings, soften man-made lines, and provide graceful transitions from one outdoor area to another. Flowers can be used to catch the eye, accent a view, frame a door, or just draw attention to their own blooms.
Annual plants
Annual plants are practical in that they are versatile, sturdy, and inexpensive. They quickly yield color for one long season.
Perennial plants
Perennial plants return year after year. They fit into many landscapes and can be used in borders, as accents, or as strong focal points. The foliage of many perennials is attractive during nonflowering seasons as well.
Roses
Where noted, much of the content of this area was taken from an Extension short course, Growing and Enjoying Roses in Mississippi, presented in the spring of 2007.- Control Fire Ants in Your Yard
- Crafting with Roses*
- Insect Pests of Roses
- Other Sources of Information on Roses*
- Propagating Plants For The Home Landscape
- Pruning/Deadheading*
- Pruning Diagrams*
- Recommended Roses for Mississippi Gardens (slides)
- Recommended Roses for Mississippi Gardens (text)
- Rose Propagation
- Site Selection, Bed Preparation and Planting of Roses
- Spicy Rose Potpourri*
- Suggested Roses for Landscape Uses*
- Techniques and Tips for Growing Good Roses
- Using Roses in the Landscape*
- Watering and Plant Disease
Content for parts of this section comes from Extension Publication #P1826 - Annual & Perennial Flowers For Mississippi Gardens and *where noted, from a rose short course, Growing and Enjoying Roses in Mississippi, presented in the spring of 2007 by the MSU Extension Service.
Publications
News
With summer officially here and hot and humid weather firmly in place, many gardeners -- myself included -- like to look at a pretty landscape, but don't really want to get out and do much work in that same landscape.
So selecting plants that look good without much work pique my interest. One plant that doesn't disappoint me is Sun coleus.
Summer officially begins this week, and there are so many great plants we can grow during this season. But I really miss one that we can't grow in the summer: annual impatiens.
I always have impatiens in my late-winter and early-spring landscape. I've tried to oversummer some -- in the same manner as we overwinter plants -- in the shady areas of my garden, but this experiment is always met with bitter disappointment.
But all is not lost because I can grow SunPatiens, one of my favorite summer-flowering plants.
Once we get into the summer months, it can be hard to plant and be successful with in-ground landscape beds. But I've found that putting together container plantings gives me a way to add variety to my garden and landscape, even when it's really hot.
Once you start gardening in containers, you’ll find it's never too late in the season to try something new. You may even join me in doing most of your gardening in containers all year.
But let's just start with one container and see how it goes.
Whenever I see Angelonias in a landscape, I'm reminded of my other favorite flowering annuals for the cool season: snapdragons.
Angelonia, a member of the snapdragon family, thrives in the full sun during the summer heat and humidity. This stamina is a requirement for our Mississippi gardens and landscapes and why I consider it one of the best plants for my hot summer garden.
I wrote earlier about my 40-year struggle with growing roses. But during that time, there was one rose that was a great performer for me: a climbing rose called Blaze.
