Colorful Summer Plants for Your Front Porch, Southern California Garden, or Patio

Written by Kelsey W.

Many native California plants blend in with their surroundings, creating a subtle and harmonious look for the landscape. However, you have many options for creating a bountiful and colorful display in your yard with plants that offer exceptional colors and blooms.

As you choose your summer garden plants, you’ll want to make sure the plants you choose regularly bloom in the summer months, since some plants actually go dormant or stop blooming in the summer to conserve energy during the stressful hot months of the year.

SoCal actually has quite a few winter-blooming plants, so you may want to choose a few of those plants to include in your garden alongside the plants in this list, so you can have blooms all year long.

For now, let’s explore some of the most beautiful plants that will make your summer garden beautiful. Many of these plants will also bloom for multiple years, so you’ll only need to plant them once to enjoy them for many summers.

Brighten Your Yard with Desert Marigolds

One of the coolest things about desert marigolds, also known as wild marigolds, is that they actually do quite well in poor soil conditions and don’t seem to mind it when their environment is a little hostile. Not only do they grow big, beautiful yellow blooms all spring and summer, but they also come back every year because they’re perennials.

Desert marigolds last two or three years, but they reseed themselves, so new plants start growing every year, keeping the colony growing for as long as you care for it. If you feed and water desert marigolds in the cooler months, sometimes you can get them to continue blooming outside their normal spring and summer growing seasons.

Create an Elegant Yard with Island Pink Yarrow

The yarrow plant is ubiquitous throughout Southern California, but one of the prettiest is the island pink yarrow, which is native to the Santa Barbara area.  The flowers on this plant emerge in a beautiful shade of pale pink, but sometimes you can find varieties that grow in deeper hues of pink and rose.

Island pink yarrow is most comfortable near the coast, but you can grow this plant in partial shade if you live further inland in Southern California. The key is keeping it protected from the afternoon sun and trying to place it somewhere that it gets most of its sun in the morning rather than the afternoon.

Bring Pops of Color to Your Home with Celestial Blue Sage

Celestial blue sage is similar to the popular SoCal native Cleveland sage since it’s a cross between blue sage and Cleveland sage. The puffy purplish-blue flowers smell wonderful in an outdoor garden, and you’ll get to enjoy this plant’s flowers all throughout the spring and summer.

Celestial blue sage is the perfect plant for yards that need some color, especially since it’s tolerant of the hot summers in the Southland and beyond.  When fully grown, this plant can get up to five feet tall, so it can really bring some big, beautiful color to your yard as a floral showpiece.

Make Your Home Look a Little Wild With California Goldenrod

If you’re a fan of plants that look a little wild and untamed, the California goldenrod plant is a great choice. Not only does it decorate your yard with lots of tiny yellow flowers on its long stems, but it can grow up to five feet tall, making it a great focal point for a yard with some wildflowers.

One of the beneficial features of California goldenrod is that it blooms in the late summer and into the fall, and as a late-year bloomer, it’s an essential resource for pollinators looking for flowers late in the year. If you need some late-summer color, California goldenrod is a great plant to brighten your yard.

Make a Statement with the Huge Flowers of the Matija Poppy

Sometimes it’s not always about color; it’s more about finding plants that offer big blooms. If you’re not averse to having a plant stake its claim in your yard and do everything in its power to grow as many blooms as possible, you couldn’t do better than the Matija poppy or “fried egg plant.”

The large dark green leaves of the plant look particularly striking against light-colored houses, especially when all the flowers come around in the late summer. They do quite well in the drought conditions common in the summers in SoCal, so make sure to avoid overwatering them to keep them happy throughout the season.

Have an Ever-Blooming Yard with Desert Globemallow

The desert globemallow plant has the capability to bloom all year long when you give it a little extra water throughout the year. The key to getting more blooms after the growing season is complete is to do a little pruning of all the limbs, which will encourage further flower growth.

You’ll commonly see this plant in a reddish hue, but you can also find it in lavender and white, which may suit your yard’s color scheme better. For growing the most flowers on the plant, make a very specific watering schedule where you allow the soil to dry out completely and then soak the ground around the plant once or twice a month (once the plant is established).

Tip: If you find your desert globemallow isn’t flowering as much as you’d like in the summer, make sure you’re keeping the roots cool with water.

You Can’t Grow Wrong with Common Sunflowers

One of the biggest and coolest flowers out there is the sunflower, and a garden full of them is guaranteed to make your July and August bright and cheerful months with their iconic, giant blooms. If you’ve never grown a sunflower before, you might be surprised to learn that some varieties can actually grow up to 16 feet tall under ideal growing conditions.

For the most part, if you water them regularly, the sunflowers you might grow in your garden will tower somewhere around six feet tall and may produce big, cheerful flowers and big, fat leaves. Get your biggest and brightest blooms by putting them in a really sunny area of your yard and watering them deeply but infrequently during the summer.

Encouraging Your Plants to Grow More Flowers

Most native plants don’t need a tremendous amount of water because they’re able to deal with the amount of moisture the environment naturally provides. However, one of the easiest ways to encourage plants to grow more flowers is to do more feeding, pruning, and – sometimes – watering.

If you have any time to spend in your garden, your number one activity should include deadheading, which is the simple process of removing old or spent blooms from your plants. Removing old flowers will encourage the plant to grow new flowers, even helping to extend the growing season.

If you’re ready to move on from deadheading into some advanced plant care, you can add pinching to your regimen. This process involves pinching off the tips of new growth while plants are young, which helps to encourage the plant to grow more branches, which means more available sites for flowers.

Feeding your plants regularly is also a great way to encourage the production of new blooms, but it’s important that your fertilizer isn’t too high in nitrogen, because that will encourage more leaves to grow rather than flowers.

A final method for encouraging maximum flower growth is making sure the plants get as much sun as they can tolerate each day. Don’t go overboard if the plants like partial shade, but push it as far as you can by putting the plants somewhere they’ll get as much sunlight as experts recommend that particular type of plant can handle.

Find Beautiful & Colorful Plants for Your SoCal Garden at Green Thumb Nursery

The experts at Green Thumb Nursery are ready to help you create a colorful and vibrant garden this summer, whether you live in a home with lots of space for gardening or you’re just looking for a few container plants to brighten your patio. Visit a southern California location today to start exploring your options for beautifying your home with new plants.

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