Plant Alliums to Add Variety and Beauty to Your Garden
Plant Alliums to Add Variety and Beauty to Your Garden
By Melinda Myers
Take your garden to new heights with alliums. This ornamental member of the onion family provides welcome color as spring bulbs fade and before summer perennials fill our gardens with colorful blooms.
Most people have seen pictures of the giant allium but there are many other options of flower sizes and heights suitable for any size and style garden. Most allium flowers are globe shaped and all are made of tiny florets. They make great cut flowers, the pollinators love them, and deer tend to leave them be.
Plan for months of color by including a variety of alliums that bloom from late spring through early summer. Longfield Gardens’ Planning Guide for Alliums (longfield-gardens.com) showcases the various alliums, their size and bloom time to help you plan. Add alliums to gardens in USDA Plant Hardiness Zones 4 to 8 in the fall when planting other spring flowering bulbs, like tulips and daffodils.
Dress up the front of a flowerbed or rock garden with Allium karataviense. It may be small in stature at only eight to ten inches tall, but the broad grey-green leaves and five-inch round, silvery-pink flowers provide big impact in the late spring garden.
Purple Sensation allium livens up the early season garden with its violet-purple, four-inch diameter flowers. Photograph courtesy of Longfield-Gardens.com.
Add years of spring beauty with Purple Sensation. Its shimmering four-inch diameter, violet-purple flowers are held above the leaves on 24 to 30-inch tall stems. It provides nice height and vibrant color to the early season garden. You will enjoy these alliums and their offspring for years to come.
For something uniquely different, add Allium bulgaricum, also known as Nectaroscordum bulgaricum, to perennial and informal gardens. The cluster of drooping cream and burgundy bell-shaped flowers are followed by seedpods that lift themselves skyward. This provides an interesting vertical accent in the garden.
Gladiator and Globemaster are sure to have passersby and visitors stopping to take a second look at your garden. Mix them in amongst perennials and add to mixed borders. Gladiator has blue-violet, six-inch diameter flowers that are smaller than Globemaster’s, but Gladiator blooms earlier and stands a foot taller, and the leaves are long lasting. Both are sure to grab your attention and that of pollinators.
Stretch your enjoyment into early summer with Ambassador. Its dense, five to six-inch violet-blue flowers are a deeper color than most alliums. What’s even more impressive is these large flowers are atop four to five-foot stems. Like the other alliums, bees and butterflies love it.
It’s no surprise that Allium christophii is a favorite among gardeners. The eight to ten-inch diameter violet-pink flowers have spikey florets and a silvery sheen that makes them look like globes in the garden. Though this allium is only 12 to 18 inches tall, it has a big presence in the garden and is very long-lasting.
Allium schubertii produces even larger, 12” diameter flowers on stems of a similar height. Some of the star-like florets are closer to the center of the flower than others and this makes the blossom appear to be expanding, like fireworks in the garden. Save some of the seedheads and use them in dried flower arrangements.
The flowers of heirloom Allium atropurpureum are dome-shaped rather than round. Their dramatic, dark burgundy color and upright stature add structure to the garden. They are also long-lasting cut flowers.
End the season with drumstick allium. The egg-shaped flowers are raspberry on top and green on the bottom, with long, slender stems. They are perfect grow-through plants and good companions for ornamental grasses.
Add a variety of alliums to your garden this fall and enjoy the added color, texture, and height this group of plants provide. You and the pollinators will be glad you did.
By Barbara Schneider, Gibbs Gardens
Photos courtesy of Gibbs Garden
If you think the flower show is over once summer fades … think again. Fall has its own cast of joyful and colorful characters. For an interesting article, click here .
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