Brighten your home, as well as your garden, with these cut-and-come-back perennial flowers. Summer bouquets are a bargain when you can pick flowers from your garden! Today, flowers bring beauty first to beds and borders, then to bouquets.

• The best time to pick flowers is late afternoon, after morning dew dries and midday heat subsides. With a garden full of flowers in every stage of bloom, be choosy about which stems you cut for indoor bouquets.
• Cut stems at an angle and place promptly in a pail of tepid water.
• Revive wilting blooms by cutting stems again underwater to help them absorb moisture.
• Reduce decay by stripping leaves that would otherwise be below the waterline of the finished bouquet from the stems.
• Prolong the life of your bouquet by replacing the water daily, each time adding a floral preservative to the water.

Blazing Star Liatris
Perennial
A North American prairie native, blazing star bears spikes of white, rose, or purple flowers that attract butterflies. It’s an excellent plant to add vertical accent to the perennial garden, and the blooms are ideal for cutting and drying.

Coreopsis
Perennial
Like yarrow, coreopsis is an easy-to-grow wildflower with colorful blooms held atop long slender stems. It’s not very picky about soil, tolerating poor, shallow, chalky, or dry soils. It blooms usually in yellows and golds, with daisy-like 2-inch flowers. ‘Early Sunrise’ is a favorite. Try the new Sizzle and Spice series to add oranges and red to the garden.

Perennial Sage
Perennial
Salvia is a wonderfully long bloomer. It starts flowering in mid-spring to early summer and re-blooms through early autumn if you keep cutting the faded flowers off. It’s also one of the most carefree perennials you pick for your garden.

Garden Phlox
Perennial
Garden Phlox grows three to four feet tall and bears large trusses of fragrant flowers from summer to early fall. It’s an old-fashioned favorite that has few rivals for its color display and light, sweet fragrance. It’s well suited to the back of the garden and cottage gardens.

Japanese Anemone
Perennial
Fill your late-summer and fall garden with cheery anemone blooms. The vigorous plants bear clusters of silky, shallow-cupped white, rose, or pink flowers with green button-like centers, surrounded by a halo of yellow stamens.

Lily
Perennial
Lilies such as ‘Star Gazer’ are some of the most popular flowers at florist shops. Their star-shaped blooms appear in a number of shades, from pink and red to orange, yellow, and bi-colors. Many, especially Oriental lily varieties, are exceedingly fragrant.

Coneflower
Perennial
These tough, colorful perennials from long-lasting flowers on straight stems. Coneflowers generally bloom from summer until the first frost, providing months of flowers to cut for bouquets. For flowers past their prime, petals can be picked off and the spikey orange centers used as accents in bouquets.

Peony
Perennial
Often sweetly fragrant, peony is a very long-lived plant that forms two to four foot tall clumps in shrub-like bunches. Its numerous varieties offer a wide range of colors, blooming in June.

Aster
Perennial
Create bouquets in fall with lovely asters. These perennials bear lovely daisy-shaped flowers in shades of pink, purple, blue, and white. Smaller selections make great filler flowers.

Bee Balm
Perennial
Bee balm is the perfect companion for obedient plant. The flowers look great together in the garden and in the vase. This perennial offers colorful clusters of red, pink, lavender, violet, or white flowers in summer. It’s a favorite of hummingbirds.

Crocosmia
Perennial
Add an exotic touch to your favorite arrangements with Crocosmia. This gladiolus relative bears clusters of bold red, orange, or yellow flowers that always seem to be the center of attention.

Blanket Flower
Perennial
Blanket Flower is a heat- and drought-tolerant wildflower that provides long-lasting color in a sunny border with poor soil. Its daisy-like, three inch wide, single or double flowers bloom through the summer and into the fall.

Feverfew
Perennial
These easy-care perennials form mounding plants covered in hundreds of tiny, daisy-like flowers with both single and double-petal varieties. Cut flowers are useful as delicate fillers in bouquets.

Dahlia
Annual
Dahlias, with their strong stems, long-lasting blooms, and substantial, attractive foliage, make striking cut flowers. Through centuries of hybridizing and selection, dahlias have become tremendously diversified, available in numerous flower types and flower sizes (from 2 to 12 inches across) and many colors.

Cosmos
Annual
Showy summer and fall blooming plants grow with an open and branching in habit and produce daisy-like flowers in many colors and forms. The height of these flowers vary, from two and a half to six feet, with taller varieties like Sensation providing longer stems for cut flowers.

Gladiolus
Annual
These tender bulbs are planted starting in spring, then every few weeks to ensure continuous bloom. An elegant flower, Gladiolas have tall spikes crowded with ruffled flowers that face the same direction and open from the bottom of the stem up. In cold climates, the bulbs (technically called corms) must be dug up and stored in a cool location that will not freeze.

Zinnia
Annual
Garden stalwarts, zinnias have been a favorite for generations. They’re a snap to start from seed and their bright colors are wonderful for late-summer bouquets.

Read about how you can extend the life of your fresh-cut flowers.