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15 Inspiring Summer Gardens in All Their Colorful Glory

Bookmark these ideas for your garden and enjoy a dazzling display of colorful flowers, abundant veggies and more

Lauren Dunec Hoang July 24, 2018

Houzz Editor; landscape designer and former garden editor for Sunset Magazine and in-house designer for Sunset's Editorial Test Garden. Her garden designs have been featured in the Sunset Western Garden Book of Landscaping, Sunset Western Garden Book of Easy-Care Plantings (cover), Inhabitat, and POPSUGAR.

Houzz Editor; landscape designer and former garden editor for Sunset Magazine and... More

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From heaps of vine-ripe melons to overflowing flower beds filled with fragrant blooms, summer gardens are all about abundance and enticing the senses. From photos alone, you can almost smell the pungent green scent of tomato leaves and hear the bees drifting lazily from flower to flower. Even with a small space, you can tap into the bounty of the season with container-grown veggies or a bed devoted to cutting flowers for summer bouquets.

For inspiration for next summer’s garden — or simply a pleasurable afternoon slideshow — take a look at these 15 abundant gardens at the height of the summer season.

JuliaGarden Design Ltd.

1. Dahlia border. Dahlias, some of summer’s top cutting flowers, are easy to grow and come in a wide range of colors, from hot pinks and oranges to florists’ favorite ‘Cafe au Lait’, with a faded blush hue. Dahlias can be grown in any size garden or in a medium-size container on a balcony. If you have the space, dedicate a whole bed to dahlias and enjoy abundant bouquets.

While dahlias usually perform best when grown in full sun, the designer of the Boston garden shown here notes that the plants still bloom with only morning sun.

Learn how to grow dahlias

Garden Club London Ltd

2. Summer seating area. Surrounded by swaths of feathery ornamental grasses, soft lamb’s ears (Stachys byzantina) and fragrant lavender, this petite patio in an English garden feels straight out of a storybook. To re-create this look at home, stick to a pastel color palette — soft lavender, pale yellow, white and pinks — for summer flowers, and plant in layers around a seating area.

See more outdoor seating options

NatureWorks Landscape Services, Inc.

3. Pollinator-friendly. A rainbow of blooms would attract pollinators far and wide to this Massachusetts garden. Different pollinators — butterflies, bees, hummingbirds and more — are attracted to specific, sometimes different, color and flower shapes. Planting multiples of the same plant in clusters makes it easier for pollinators to spot from a distance, and including a variety of flower shapes and colors welcomes a range of beneficial insects and birds to your garden.

How to Grow a Modern Pollinator Garden

Fifth Season Landscape Design & Construction

4. Colorful kitchen garden. When summer produce is at its peak, there’s hardly anywhere sweeter to be than in the center of a kitchen garden. Weaving flowering herbs and perennials into edible beds or using them as path edgers in a larger kitchen garden not only looks beautiful, it also helps bring in beneficial pollinators that the crops need to produce fruit.

Fifth Season Landscape Design & Construction

Harvest tip: While zucchinis and summer squash should be picked regularly and are tastiest when small, hard-skinned squashes such as gourds and pumpkins should be left on the vine for much longer. Wait to pick these until the stem, and often most of the leaves, are yellow and the pumpkin or gourd makes a hollow sound when knocked.

Jakobstuin

5. Summer meadow. This dreamy perennial meadow in the Dutch countryside looks like a tapestry of color come midsummer. The two standout summer perennials in this garden can be tried at home: orange blanket flower (Gaillardia sp.) and scarlet beebalm (Monarda didyma). Monarda ‘Scorpion’ is pictured here.

See other hot color palettes for the garden

Adrienne DeRosa

6. Al fresco dining. Nothing beats eating outside on a warm summer evening. All it really takes is an outdoor dining table, chairs and maybe a fresh tablecloth, flowers and candles — if you’re feeling fancy — to turn any evening into a celebration of the season. The elegant dining setup in this Cleveland garden was put together with thrifted finds and a set of folding chairs the homeowner rescued from a dumpster.

Scott Byron & Co., Inc.

7. Summer brights. Proving you can light up a garden with a single container, this magenta, red and coral combination in Chicago glows like a pot of embers. Plants include magenta petunia, coral tiplant (Cordyline fruticosa), medium-pink gaura (Gaura lindheimeri), orange-flowering lantana (Lantana camara) and Big Red Bronze Leaf begonia. This combination would thrive in full to partial sun and with regular water.

Matthew Cunningham Landscape Design LLC

8. Coneflower and Russian sage. This classic summer combination would shine in a garden of any size. Both purple ‘Magnus’ coneflower (Echinacea purpurea ‘Magnus’) and pale-purple Russian sage (Perovskia atriplicifolia) are long-blooming perennials that start to flower in late spring and carry on through summer and into fall.

Margie Grace - Grace Design Associates

9. Front yard veggies. Landscape designer Margie Grace’s front yard in Santa Barbara, California, offers far more than a standard patch of mowed grass. By summer, it’s bursting with pots of productive veggies, kitchen herbs and flowering perennials.

Margie Grace - Grace Design Associates

After much experimentation with her garden, Grace began filling containers with veggies years ago. “The large pots provide plenty of no-bend, clean-shoe gardening (my favorite kind),” she writes. “The pots are placed where there’s great sun exposure and air circulation, providing structure, color and interest to the garden.”

Sarah Greenman

10. Summer sunflowers. Easy to grow and a feast for the eyes by midsummer, annual sunflowers (Helianthus annuus) are a summer classic for good reason. Sunflowers are true to seed, meaning seeds saved from a sunflower this season will produce an almost identical plant next year.

Top sunflower varieties to grow at home include: pale yellow ‘Lemon Queen’, fuzzy-centered ‘Teddy Bear’, deep burgundy ‘Chocolate Cherry’, rose-pink ‘Strawberry Blonde’ and sunny yellow ‘Van Gogh’.

Mierop Design, FAPLD

11. Clouds of hydrangea. A mass of ‘Nikko Blue’ hydrangea (H. macrophylla) forms a beautifully frothy border along a picket fence in New England. Hydrangeas change color from pink to lavender to blue based on the pH level of the soil. Grown in alkaline soil, hydrangea flowers are more pink. The often-desired blue comes out when hydrangeas are either grown in naturally acidic soil or when acid is added to the soil, through sprinkling a layer of coffee grounds or a granular acidic supplement at the base of the plant.

Flowers in the Front Yard

12. Flower walk. Overflowing with flowering perennials of all shapes and sizes, this Toronto garden bordering the street is a feast for the senses — and a gift to the neighbors. Flowers in this garden bed include: pink mallow, purple clematis, Oriental lilies, pink cosmos, dark-leafed canna, low-growing white sweet alyssum and more.

California Eco Design, Inc.

13. Dry garden. While annuals and perennials typically put on the biggest show in spring and summer, a garden made up of colorful succulents looks vibrant year-round. This Southern California garden includes a combination of bird-of-paradise (Strelitzia sp.), agaves and other succulents such as milk bush (Euphorbia tirucalli ‘Sticks on Fire’), silvery blue chalk sticks (Senecio sp.), ‘Sunburst’ aeonium and more. All plants in this garden are drought-tolerant and take little water once established.

Thomas Shafer Architects LLC

14. Rooftop veggies. A series of raised beds filled with culinary herbs, corn, tomatoes, towering sunflowers and other vegetables turn an unused rooftop into a productive farm in this garden outside Chicago.

Note: Not all roofs are designed with the right drainage or support to make them suitable for heavy raised beds.

Wallace Landscape Associates

15. Late-summer tones. In this Philadelphia garden, bronze tones mix with gold and green, carrying the garden from summer to fall. Plants include bronze-leafed heuchera, yarrow (Achillea sp.) and other perennials.