Grow Sedums For Surprising Fall Color

You can always rely on sedums to produce color in the fall garden. Through the summer sedums are nothing special with their thick fleshy leaves and green flower buds, but come the autumn and they really come into their own. While the blooms are mainly pink there are other shades as Jennifer explains in her article which I found on the Three Dogs In A Garden website.

I have come to love sedums for the element of surprise they add to the autumn garden.

As the days shorten and the nights grow colder, a sedum’s color changes with the advancing season. I delight to find flower buds, which were cream one sunny afternoon, have taken on a peachy tone a few days later. Yet another day, on my way to the back of the garden, I’ll discover a pretty pink sedum has deepen into a fiery shade of magenta almost overnight.

Industrious bumble bees seem to tap dance on top of the parachute-shaped flower heads. Wasps love them too, but butterflies seem to prefer the small white flowers of the Joe Pye Weed in another part of the garden.

Frost always seem to strike just as the flowers become their most vibrant. In October, they continue to stand tall amongst the storm of falling leaves, their color having morphed yet again into a mellow reddish brown.

Even in the dead of winter sedums seem to have a melancholy beauty.

If you look close, you see that each plant lights hundreds of miniature firecrackers each fall.