Perennial Flowers add color to your NJ Garden
Planting perennials in your garden can fill your landscape with beautiful color and add interesting texture to your garden design throughout the year. Unlike annuals that must be replanted every year, perennial flowers are hardy bloomers that come back year after year, often with minimal care and maintenance. The lifespan of perennial flowers ranges from three to 15 years, although some varieties like peonies can bloom for a lifetime.
Choosing the Right Perennials Flowers for your Garden Design
There’s a wide variety of perennial flowers that grow well in Bergen County, located in USDA Hardiness Zone 6.
Perennial flowers give your garden design a beautiful look with their shape, colors, and textures. Some of these plants grow in mounted clusters while others are often used as groundcovers. Perennials can also be classified as either sun-loving varieties or shade-loving varieties.
See our list of perennial flowers from Borst Landscape and Design that will thrive in your New Jersey garden.
1. Anemone
Anemones are delicate, colorful flowers with bright green stems that are wonderful in cut flower arrangements, adding a fragrant scent for even more appeal. Anemones are sometimes referred to as windflowers because a field of anemones seems to blow freely in the wind, creating a type of poetic dance. While the flowers of anemones can flatten, they most often produced cupped flowers in pink, purple, rose or white with deeply lobed foliage.
Light: full sun, partial sun
Height: 1 to 3 feet
Spread: 1 to 3 feet
Blooms: spring, summer, and fall
2. Aster
Asters are easy to grow and drought-tolerant and are always at the top of the list of perennial flowers for garden design in the New Jersey area. Asters provide striking color in any landscape and because of their height can offer variation in a garden. Some of them grow from 6 to 8 feet tall and bloom with beautiful hues of pink, white, purple, and lavender.
Light: full sun
Height: 1 to 8 feet
Spread: 1 to 4 feet
Blooms: spring and fall
3. Astilbe
Astilbe is one of the most graceful perennials with a feathery texture and soft colors in white, red, blue, and pink. Often used in Northern New Jersey garden design, Astilbe can tolerate direct sunlight, as long as there are adequate water and rich moist soil. It’s best to grow in shady areas because as summer heat builds, the leaves can easily scorch in the sun.
Light: shade, partial sun
Height: 5 inches to 8 feet
Spread: 18 to 30 inches
Blooms: spring and summer
4. Basket-of-Gold
Basket-of-gold loves to grow in unexpected places such as at the edge of patio borders, cracks between paving stones, rocky garden areas, and the edge of gravel pathways. This perennial is one of the top choices for people looking to add informal perennial flowers in their New Jersey garden design. As the name suggests, Basket-of-gold adds a lot of color to your landscape with its vibrant gold flowers.
Height: 6 inches to 3 feet
Spread: 12 to 18 inches
Bloom: spring
5. Bee Balm
Bee balm is one of the most effortless, beautiful perennial flowers that also has an added bonus of attracting bees and butterflies to your garden design area. It is a native plant to New Jersey with lovely spider-like flowers in jewel tones of pink, red, purple, and white. These bright, eye-catching flowers produce fragrant scents and grow in clumps of dark foliage
Light: sun, partial sun
Height: 1 to 8 feet
Spread: up to 2 feet
Blooms: summer and fall
6. Blanket Flower
Blanket flowers produce both single and double daisy-like blossoms in colors ranging from orange to bright yellow. These are very well suited for a hot, sunny garden. Of particular importance in the New Jersey area, these flowers thrive in gardens because they are deer resistant and tolerate light frost.
Light: full sun
Height: 1 to 3 feet
Spread: 6 inches to 2 feet
Blooms: summer and fall
7. Butterfly Weed
Butterfly weed is a plant, which requires minimal care and maintenance and is also native to New Jersey. Brightly colored flowers in white, orange, red, and pink attract many types of butterflies and birds. Butterfly weed is fragrant, drought-tolerant, and deer resistant. It tops the list of 20 perennial flowers for your New Jersey garden design.
Light: full sun
Height: 1 to 8 feet
Spread: 2 to 3 feet
Blooms: summer
8. Chrysanthemum
Chrysanthemums produce many different shaped blossoms. Some chrysanthemums look like daisies while others produce blooms that are flat, fringed, rounded, quill, or spoon-shaped. They are a must-have for any type of garden design. The flowers can be seen in shades of pink, red, white, green, blue, and pink. Chrysanthemums are great in garden areas and containers.
Chrysanthemums are great in garden areas and containers.
Light: full sun, partial sun
Height: 1 to 3 feet
Spread: 1 to 3 feet
Blooms: summer and fall
9. Coral Bells
The diverse colors and interesting textures of coral bells make them a favorite on the list of perennial flowers for New Jersey garden design. Coral bells produce spires of dainty, white, pink, and green flowers and different colored foliage in silver, purple, and burgundy. They grow in low clumps, so they work well as border plants and groundcovers. Coral bells like rich, hummus-like soil that retains a lot of moisture.
Light: full sun, partial sun, shade
Height: 1 to 3 feet
Spread: 6 to 30 inches
Blooms: spring, summer and fall
10. Daylily
Daylilies are a very common perennial flower and are easy to grow and often seen growing in the wild. There are over 50,000 types of hybrid daylilies that produce trumpet-shaped delicate flowers in shades of pink, orange, blue, and red. July blooms sprout on tall stalks that make them a beautiful asset to many types of outdoor spaces.
Light: full sun, partial sun
Height: 6 inches to 8 feet
Spread: 1 to 3 feet
Blooms: spring and summer
11. Delphinium
Delphiniums are one of the favorite choices of many gardeners. They produce beautiful blooms in shades of pink, purple, blue, and white that tower over course, dark green foliage. They are eye-catching in both formal and informal garden designs. Delphiniums need to be sheltered from the wind and should receive a good amount of moisture. They may re-bloom if you cut down the stalks after the flowers wilt.
Light: full sun, partial sun
Height: 1 to 8 feet
Spread: 1 to 3 feet
Blooms: summer
12. Goldenrod
Goldenrod flowers actually do not produce a lot of pollen to aggravate allergies. While its pollen does not blow in the wind, it does stick to the legs of insects, but the idea that it increases allergies is a myth. Goldenrod plants are easy to grow, with magnificent sprays of tiny yellow flowers that are a bountiful source of nectar for bees and butterflies. Check the variety of Goldenrod you plant to ensure it will not spread out of control in your garden design.
Light: full sun, partial sun, shade
Height: 5 inches to 8 feet
Spread: 8 inches to 3 feet
Blooms: summer and fall
13. Hellebore
Hellebores produce saucer-shaped flowers in burgundy, pink, yellow, and white. Flowers are often speckled, providing amazing texture and color. These plants are easy to grow and are low maintenance, which makes them a great choice for New Jersey woodland garden designs.
Light: full sun, partial sun, shade
Height: 1 to 8 feet
Spread: 1 to 3 feet
Blooms: spring and winter
14. Hibiscus
Hibiscus flowers (also referred to as Rose Mallow) provide gorgeous vibrant colors to New Jersey garden designs. Growing hibiscus is an easy way to add a tropical flair to your garden. These flowers need plenty of water, must have good drainage, and do best in rich soil and lots of room to spread out.
Light: Full sun
Height: 3 to 20 feet
Spread: 3 to 5 feet
Blooms: summer and fall
15. Lupine
Lupine is also in the list of the top 20 perennial flowers because it creates gorgeous blooms in vivid shades of pink, blue and white. It produces large, pea-like flowers clustered in long spikes on sturdy stems.
The most popular type of Lupine on the list of perennials is Bicolor Russell hybrids.
Lupines prefer cooler temperatures with well-drained slightly acidic soil.
Light: full sun, partial sun
Height: 1 to 3 feet
Spread: 1 to 2 feet
Blooms: summer
16. Painted Daisy
Painted daisies can be grown easily in any type of garden design. But they work especially well in rock gardens, woodland gardens, and areas around trees and shrubs. Painted daisy perennials are the perfect height for those hard to fill middle spots in the garden when early spring blooms are dying back. Painted daisies require little maintenance when they’re planted in the right soil and location.
Light: full sun, partial sun
Height: 6 inches to 3 feet
Spread: 8 to 18 inches
Blooms: summer and fall
17. Peony
If you want brilliant color in your New Jersey garden design, plant poppies. Finer species including Iceland, Alpine, and Atlantic poppies have a special charm with flowers that come in an array of beautiful colors. Oriental poppies are less refined, but they produce large, exploding flowers in brilliant shades of white, pink, orange, red, and purple with black stamens.
Light: full sun, partial sun
Height: 1 to 8 feet
Spread: 2 to 4 feet
Blooms: spring
18. Poppy
If you want brilliant color in your New Jersey garden design, plant poppies. Finer species including Iceland, Alpine, and Atlantic poppies have a special charm with flowers that come in an array of beautiful colors. Oriental poppies are less refined, but they produce large, exploding flowers in brilliant shades of white, pink, orange, red, and purple with black stamens.
Light: full sun
Height: 6 inches to 3 feet
Spread: 4 inches to 3 feet
Blooms: spring and summer
19. Sunflower
There’s no other flower on the list of perennial flowers quite like sunflowers.
They will provide height and brilliant color to any New Jersey garden design. Sunflowers are imposingly tall with large, floppy flowers that get up to 4-inches in diameter. Bright yellow flowers form loose clusters that thrive in sun and soil that’s less than perfect. Taller flowers may need support in the garden, but they make beautiful cut flowers.
Light: full sun
Height: 3 to 20 feet
Spread: 3 to 4 feet
Blooms: summer and fall
20. Violet
Who doesn’t love violets with soft, velvety petals marked with beautiful shades of yellow and purple? Violets produce blooms in shades of white, pink, red, orange, blue, and purple. You can plant them in borders, garden beds, wildlife gardens, rock gardens, containers, and window boxes. Violets grow well in Bergen County garden designs, even in cold New Jersey winters. To prolong blooms, deadhead faded blooms and cut back weak stems.
Light: full sun, partial sun, shade
Height: 5 inches to 12 inches
Spread: 6 inches, depending on the variety
Blooms: spring, fall, and winter
In addition to the list of perennials shown above, there are many other blooming varieties, as well as exotic grasses and varieties with year-round green foliage. If you’re interested in planting a perennial garden, contact the garden designers at Borst Landscape & Design. We can help you create a beautiful garden design that will enhance the beauty of your Bergen County home. Contact us today at (201) 785-9400.
