Annual Flowers to Plant in the Summer

Planting annual flowers in your garden is the perfect way to get a beautiful summer show. Here are some of our favorite annuals for adding to your garden. Coleus tops our list because its color comes from the leaves, not the flowers. The plant appears in nearly every color from lime green to rich purple. Lots of varieties are very good, too. Most old fashioned coleus need some shade from the hot afternoon sun, but newer varieties can handle full Sunday. Lantana is one of the most heat and drought-tolerant annual flowers around. The dark green leaves are a perfect accent for the colorful clusters of red, orange, yellow, pink, purple or white flowers. Many varieties of lantana have multi-colored blooms. Zinnia is an old fashioned annual and is as popular today as it was in your grandmother's time. Newer varieties such as the profusions and zaharas, they've perky flowers in shades of orange, red, yellow, white and pink, and resist disease better than old fashioned varieties. Angelonia, sometimes called summer snapdragon, count on angelonia to offer blue, purple, pink or white flowers on spiky stems nonstop all summer long, no matter what the weather's like.