Fill that sunny spot in your garden with flowers for the sun that thrive in long days of bright light. Full-sun perennials need six to eight hours of direct sun per day. They tend to produce lots of blooms, so they’ll add flower power to your yard or garden. Here’s a list of flowering perennials for sun that will bring zing to summer:
Coneflowers
Heat- and drought-tolerant coneflowers are a staple of summer gardens. These flowers for the sun produce cheerful, daisy-like flowers. Purple is the most common color of blooms but there are also varieties with white, orange and yellow flowers.
Black-Eyed Susan
This iconic yellow flower blooms like crazy from early summer to frost. It’s one of the most drought-tolerant flowers for sun and will grow in poor soil. Pinch off spent blooms and you’ll get armloads of flowers.
Hardy Hibiscus
The only thing this plant has in common with its fragile tropical cousins is a love of sun. One of the showiest flowering perennials for sun, hardy hibiscus produces blooms the size of dinner plates in red, pink, white and yellow.
Lobelia
This water-loving plant produces spikes of deep red, pink, white or blue flowers with deep green to reddish purple foliage. It loves water, so it’s a good choice for low areas in your garden where you want flowering perennials, full sun.
Coreopsis
This easy-to-grow perennial thrives in dry, sunny locations. It blooms all summer in a wide range of colors and sizes. ‘Moonbeam’ and ‘Zagreb’ varieties produce drifts of yellow or pink daisy-like flowers in the sun. ‘Early Sunrise’ has a larger, orange bloom.
Yarrow
This sun-lover produces clusters of flat-topped clusters of flowers in red, yellow or pink atop ferny, silver-gray foliage. Yarrow is drought and heat tolerant and is a good choice for a spot that’s hot and dry.
Butterfly Weed
With weed in its name, you might think this is a garden nuisance, but butterfly weed is one of the hardiest flowers for sun. Its clusters of bright, orange-yellow flowers attract monarch and other butterflies.
False Indigo
Also known as baptisia, this shrubby perennial grows stalks of blue, white, purple or yellow flowers in the sun. Its blue-green foliage makes plants lovely after the flowers are gone.
Red Hot Poker
This is one of the most exotic-looking flowers for sun. Spikes of red, yellow, white or orange tube-shaped flowers grow from grassy, gray-green foliage. It’s striking in groupings or as a single, dramatic specimen plant. It’s a hummingbird magnet.
Shasta Daisy
A long-time garden favorite for those who want perennial flowers, full sun, Shastas have white blooms that look like the flowers children draw. It’s leggy and may need staking. Shastas are a good flower to cut because they have a long vase-life.