Cait's Garden

I’m starting a new series of posts today. I call it “Summer-Proof Flowers”…because there’s nothing as hard on a garden as summer at its height. That might seem a weird thing to say, but the intense heat, and the bouncing between droughts and flooding that is common in a Chicagoland summer, is just too intense for faint-of-heart flowers. Also, many of our go-to perennials, like salvia, phlox, yarrow, speedwell, and lily, are kaput by late July. Once you deadhead all these, what are you left with in your yard? So I took a good inventory of what I was left with and found a new appreciation for my late summer performers.

The first featured flower in this series is not a flower at all. It’s a shrub! Limelight Hydrangeas are a miracle. Seriously, if you don’t have one, buy one. Now. I’ll wait. This sturdy upright shrub (it can reach 6 feet tall, but you can trim it to your liking) is covered in huge fluffy flower cones beginning in mid-July. They start out a bright greenish white which slowly turns to all white, then as summer wanes, they become a lovely pink/bronze color. And unlike other, fussier hydrangeas, these are reliable bloomers year on year with no intervention or soil additives needed. Nothing is more spectacular in mid to late summer. I have several Limelights in my yard and will like plant several more in years to come.