Late Summer Nights – Moonlight Flower Gardens

Relax in a Moonlight Flower Garden

Summer brings expecations of balmy evenings sitting outdoors in the garden sipping refreshing drinks wearing loose clothing and enjoying the peace – all very well for most but consider those with less regular working patterns – seasonal workers may be required to stay on to satisfy customer demands at tourist attractions, IT technicians who work long into the night running system updates sweltering in server rooms installing financial software so essential treasury management system will be effective next day.

Folks who return home after dark should plant white flowers (or salmon pink, which also shows up well in the dark) around their walkway and front steps. Planters or beds near a deck or porch where folk sit after dark can be planted with salmon pink, white, or silvery foliage plants. All this can be done on a small scale, to add great pleasure to evenings at home, without planting a full garden for evenings.

Don’t forget Evening Primrose (Oenothera).

The common Evening primrose (yellow) makes a delightful evening flower display. It is a tall biennial and looks like a weed (in some places it IS a weed), but a whirl of new bright yellow blossoms opens on every plant every evening just after sunset – you can watch them POP open in a few seconds.

The blooms have a rich dark scent of musk and fresh ground black pepper, a strong draw to their pollinator of choice, ghost-like hawk moths the size of hummingbirds.

Come morning the flowers will shrivel, unless the day is cool and overcast…

But evening will bring a fresh new round, and will do so for two months or more.