Blossoming delights for November: discover the vibrant blooms gracing your garden this month
November Garden Picks: Plants Offering Wildlife Benefits, Structure, and Colour
November is a great time to add new plants to your garden that offer benefits for wildlife, structure, and colour. Here are some of the best choices:
- Blue Grama (Bouteloua gracilis): This warm-season native grass tolerates cold and provides food and refuge for butterflies and other wildlife, creating fine-textured structure in your garden.
- Pine Muhly (Muhlenbergia dubia): Drought- and cold-tolerant, this grass offers shelter and nesting cover for wildlife, and is useful for erosion control.
- Veronica spp. (Speedwells): These perennial plants continue to bloom into November, providing colourful flower spikes for structure and visual interest.
- Euonymus fortunei ‘Moonshadow’: An evergreen variegated shrub with yellow and pink leaf margins, it brightens shady or partially sunny spots while adding textural contrast.
- Gold-Edged Winter Daphne (Daphne odora ‘Aureomarginata’): Evergreen with yellow-edged glossy leaves, winter-scented flowers, and red berries that attract birds, this shrub adds autumn/winter colour to your garden.
In addition, planting native wildflowers, maintaining leaf litter, bare soil patches, and mulch helps support beneficial insects and wildlife habitat during fall and winter.
Specific Picks
- Saxifraga 'Shiranami': Originating from China, this plant features abundant, pure-white, double flowers that froth above slightly hairy, apple-green leaves on short stems. It grows to a height of 30cm and thrives in moist but well-drained soil and full sun to part shade.
- Astilbe 'Beauty of Ernst': Garden-origin from China, this plant boasts pale-pink blooms held on upright stems, offering good autumn colour. It grows to a height of 60cm and prefers moist, rich soil and part to full shade.
- Plectranthus argentatus: Originating from Australia, this plant has blue spikes that stand out beautifully against the silver-grey leaves, making it a wonderful addition to a hot border where it provides a cooling contrast to more intense colours. It grows to a height of 80cm and prefers moist but well-drained soil and part shade.
- Deyeuxia effusiflora: This plant, originating from China, features elegant, eye-catching panicles that stand out as a solitary beauty in the middle of a border or in a prairie-style planting. It grows to a height of 1.2m and thrives in well-drained dry soil and full sun.
- Fuchsia 'Blacky': Garden-origin from Mexico, this plant offers non-stop flowers from summer to late autumn, provided temperatures remain above freezing. It grows to a height of 70cm and prefers well-drained soil and full sun to part shade.
Other notable mentions include:
- Allium thunbergii 'Ozawa': This plant, garden-origin from Japan, China, and Korea, flowers late, from September to November, producing clusters of bright-purple to purple-pink flowers. It grows to a height of 40cm and thrives in well-drained soil and full sun.
- Clematis 'Polish Spirit': This hybrid plant features medium-sized, dark-violet flowers that contrast nicely with the fresh-green leaves. It grows to a height of 3m and prefers moist but well-drained soil and full sun to part shade.
- Sorbus pseudohupehensis 'Pink Pagoda': Garden-origin from China, this plant boasts beautiful, feathered, blue-green leaves that turn a glorious rich red in autumn. It grows to a height of 8m and thrives in well-drained soil and full sun.
- Nepeta kubanica: Originating from the Russian region of Kuban (Caucasus), this plant features large, purple-blue flowers that rise beautifully above its large, fresh-green leaves, giving it a transparent feel. It grows to a height of 80cm and prefers well-drained soil and full sun.
- Acaena microphylla 'Kupferteppich': This charming groundcover plant from New Zealand features copper-colored foliage and is best grown in a gravel garden with plenty of light and air.
- Abelia x grandiflora: This plant offers fragrant, white flowers and glossy, evergreen foliage, making it a great choice for adding colour and fragrance to the garden in late autumn and winter.
- Galactites tomentosa: This plant features stunning crisp, white-and-green variegated foliage in autumn and winter, and is among the most stunning foliage found in gardens during November.
- Rosa 'Geranium': This rose is robust and disease-resistant, with large, delicately fragrant, bright-red blooms in summer, followed by attention-grabbing red hips in autumn.
- The Saxifraga 'Shiranami', a plant originating from China, adds a touch of elegance to home-and-garden landscape with abundant, white, double flowers and thrives in the lifestyle of moist but well-drained soil and full sun to part shade.
- Plectranthus argentatus, a plant from Australia, brings a cooling contrast to hot borders with its blue spikes and silver-grey leaves, enhancing the structure and visual interest of gardens.
- Euonymus fortunei ‘Moonshadow’, a variegated evergreen shrub, brightens shady or partially sunny spots in home-and-garden settings with yellow and pink leaf margins, offering textural contrast to other plants.
