May Blooming Perennials

Quickly becoming a landscape staple in cities and neighborhoods, catmint is an easy plant to grow in not-so-easy places. Lavender-blue flower spikes appear over blue-grey foliage that is soft and aromatic. Prune after blooming to promote new growth and blooms.

Lupine flowers are almost every color of the rainbow with many eye-catching bicolor varieties. The ‘Gallery Series’ and other hybrids produce a spectacular mix of lupine that bloom the first year it is planted and produces dozens of racemes full of fragrant, spicy, sweet pea like blossoms.

Perennial Dianthus are wonderful edging and groundcover plants for sunny spaces in the landscape. They typically produce low-growing mounds of grass-like foliage and repeat blooming, single, and double carnation flowers in various colors.

These gorgeous flowering vines naturally twine around supports, producing showy flowers that develop at all different times of the growing season. Clematis prefer to have their foliage in full sun but their stems in the shade, so we recommend planting other sun-loving perennials around their “feet”.

One of the most recognizable early-spring perennials, creeping phlox is a very prostrate, spreading groundcover completely covered in pastel-colored flowers. These open, five-petaled flowers are great pollinator attractors.

This upright, mounded perennial has true indigo blue, lupine-like flower spikes atop clean green foliage from late spring into summer after which black, rattling seed pods form giving this plant additional garden interest in the fall. Newer varieties are available not only in classic blue but also yellow, burgundy & cherry red.

Attract pollinators to the shade garden with its sweet, honeysuckle scent and vibrant bloom clusters. Plant these deer-resistant, shade-loving perennials in moist, well-drained soil and enjoy blooms from April-June and again late summer.