From annuals and perennials to flowering trees and shrubs, this is where your garden gets its color. Browse planting guides, bloom-time tips, and care advice for the ornamental plants that give a yard its structure, fragrance, and year-round interest.
Spring flowers like tulips and daffodils must be planted the previous fall. This guide groups the best bulbs, perennials, annuals, and shrubs by bloom time.
The southern magnolia tree is a stunning evergreen, but its size and roots surprise gardeners. Learn how to plant, care for, and choose the right cultivar.
Snowdrops are the earliest spring bulb, but dry bulbs fail to establish. Learn to plant in the green, naturalize drifts in shade, and pick the best varieties.
Shrub roses skip the fuss of finicky hybrid teas, growing like any easy flowering shrub. Learn the popular groups, plus how to plant, feed, and prune them.
Shrubs give a garden its bones, color, and privacy. Learn what defines a shrub, how to choose one by garden role, plant it right, and care for it.
A smoke tree rewards you with summer haze and fiery fall color, but only if you get its two quirks right: lean soil and the pruning that decides the smoke.
The sedum plant is the ultimate low-care perennial, but most failures come from too much water and rich soil. Learn how to grow stonecrop the right way.
The salvia plant blooms all summer with little fuss, yet one type returns each year while another dies at frost. How to plant, water, and deadhead salvia.
Sandalwood is a prized fragrant tree, but it is a slow hemiparasite that must tap a host plant’s roots and takes 15 to 30 years to harvest. How to grow it.
Sassafras is a striking native tree with three leaf shapes, fiery fall color, and aromatic roots, but it suckers fast and carries a safrole caveat.
Sagebrush dies fast from rich soil and overwatering, unlike most shrubs. Learn how to grow this silvery, aromatic native of the western high desert.
Russian sage rewards you with months of lavender-blue bloom for almost no effort, but it loves to flop. Here is how to grow it, prune it, and keep it upright.