We love spring-flowering plants and trees! Their cheerful color and fragrance are much-needed bursts of beauty to help us shake off a long, sometimes dreary winter!
Get ready to folic this spring of 2024 with some new and exciting spring-blooming perennials that will surely be your new favorite harbingers of the growing season!
Freshest Spring Flowering Favorites!
Leap into spring by mixing these easy-to-grow perennial bloomers among your spring bulbs, early spring flowering shrubs, and early-blooming trees for layers upon layers of spring delight!
1. Winter Glow Bergenia
This Pig Squeak cultivar is a truly unique and highly adaptable plant that has a world of unique perks that make it a must-have for this year's garden refresher! Let’s start with the fact it’s an evergreen perennial in mild winter climates, has fall and winter foliage color, and even reblooming fragrant rosy pink blooms! Then toss in its highly adaptable spreading rhizomes and lovely rosettes of deep green leaves that squeak when you rub them and handle full sun to full heavy shade!
- Evergreen glossy green foliage rosettes
- Slender red stems with clusters of ruffled trumpet-shaped rose-red blooms
- Fragrant for cut flower bouquets and nectar-rich for bees and butterflies!
- Widely adaptable
- Deer and rabbits seldom bother them
- Easy to grow throughout USDA hardiness zones 3 to 8!
Call them Elephant’s Ears, or spell them Winterglow or Winter Glow, Pigsqueak or Pig Squeak, Bergenia is brown-thumb-proof and won’t take up a ton of space in the garden despite being a real spring treat and year-round show-stopper!
2. Dark Side of the Moon Astilbe
Need a dramatic near-black foliage plant with blooms that shoot for the stars? You need the Dark Side of the Moon Astilbe! The intense compound leaves from tidy cascading mounds throughout the landscape, soon accented by upright green stems full of branched, deep pink to maroon buds! Opening candy pink from the bottom up, these are incredibly showy pollinator and hummingbird perennials! Long lasting in the landscape as they are in a bouquet indoors, these hardy perennials are widely adaptable and very easy to grow if you have average to moist soil.
- Tall spires of rosy-purple-pink plumes
- Dark cascading near-black foliage all growing season long
- Widely adaptable throughout USDA planting zones 4 to 9!
- Pollinator and hummingbird-friendly and dramatic cut flowers!
- Shade to part-sun gardens, container gardens, and modern fresh color!
Eclipse other plants in your garden the dark and brooding Dark Side of the Moon Astilbe. Create some much-needed drama in your landscapes! Want something less dark and brooding? Try the new Little Vision in Purple Astilbe for a fluffy candy pink bloom that is equally out of this world backed by highly textured green mounds of leaves!
3. Newest Creeping Phlox
One of the earliest spring-flowering perennials include the low-growing Carpet Phlox! Also known as Groundcover Phlox, or Creeping Phlox, some of the newest varieties include the light lavender-pink Fort Hills, the white and purple-eyed North Hills Creeping Phlox, and the vividly eye-popping scarlet-pink Scarlet Flame! You and your early-emerging pollinators will adore these carpets of evergreen needle-like foliage mounds that become smothered in gorgeous fairy flowers!
- Cold-hardy early-spring flowering groundcover and edging perennials
- Can remain evergreen in many growing zones
- Full sun perennials handle drought and xeric sites
- Nectar-rich pollinator favorites
- Can rebloom in the fall
- Blocks weeds as groundcover and great container spillers and fillers
Handling extreme cold in the north, heat and humidity in the south, while remaining easy to grow and low-maintenance everywhere, Creeping Phlox are beloved garden standards!
4. Lungwort
Lungwort are spring-flowering shade-loving perennial plants (Pulmonaria) that are also known as Common Lungwort or Lady's Milk Drops. Lungwort’s silver-speckled foliage is a gorgeous accent for the taller stems with terminal clusters of brilliant blue, pink, or white trumpet-shaped blossoms in the spring! The long-lasting show continues for weeks, before leaving so you can focus on their spectacular bespeckled leaves all summer and fall. Calling bees (especially Bumblebees!) and Hummingbirds to shady gardens! The light blue or purple blooms age to violets and pinks throughout the mid to late spring, creating a multi-hued effect on the same plant!
- Tall stems packed with many little purple, blue to pink color-changing flowers
- Blooms all spring on tall stems - Vital pollinator resource
- Early spring color in the shade and moist partial shade garden
- Spreading and creeping politely by way of underground rhizomes
- Wonderfully easy to grow USDA growing zones 3 to 8/9
Lungworts are ideal shade garden jeweled, interesting mixed perennial garden additions, lovely Moon garden specimens for their foliage, and work beautifully in containers and planters, or as unique foliage accents!
5. Coral Bells
Coral Bells (Heuchera) may not flower until the summer, but their dramatic and colorful foliage takes the stage from the early days of the spring growing season! Their leaves (sometimes changing color throughout the year) are the real stars of the show anyway and last much longer than the blooms. Albeit, those delicate and dainty fairy flowers are fragrant and beloved by all - especially florists and pollinators for their long stems, sweet scent, and ample nectar for bees.
The textured leaves can be two-tone or variegated, usually spectacularly saturated, and for the most part - anything but ho-hum green! Choose from chartreuse, purple, near-black, orange, caramel and peach hues, to red, burgundy, purple, and bronze or silver splashed! Then they change from spring wardrobes to summer hues, to dramatic fall colors too!
- Long lasting - sometimes evergreen/semi-evergreen - textured foliage mounds
- Hardy in cold and heat/humidity
- Wonderfully easy to grow
- Summer blooms are pollinator-friendly and look great in bouquets!
- Dizzying array of foliage colors to choose from - look great all growing season long
Fantastic shade to partial shade garden edging and specimens, or moist full sun cool-climate accents, Coral Bells offer space-saving interest that can’t be beat! Some of the newer varieties of Coral Bells to include in your landscape are the spiced reds of Carnival™ Cinnamon Stick and Carnival™ Fall Festival Coral Bells perpetual autumn colors, the purple, bronze and green Palace Purple, and the soft peachy caramels of Southern Comfort Coral Bells!
In With The Old and In With The New Too!
Keep planting those old-fashioned standards like Peony, Columbine, and Bleeding Hearts which are always sure-fire early-spring bloomers that consistently knock your socks off, but add a touch of spice with some fresh, new spring-flowering perennials that turn heads!
Check out these and all Spring-Flowering Perennials available at Nature Hills and leap into spring of 2024 with both feet!
Happy Planting!
