You'll Love These Cool-Weather Flowers

Not only do flowers add beauty to your space and attract lots of beneficial insects, they can also improve the overall health of your garden. Chamomile, for example, releases chemicals that encourage other plants around them to grow faster and taste better, and ornamental alliums repel pests.

Some of these flowers are even edible and provide benefits to you in the form of antioxidants and essential nutrients. Flowers in the Aster family in particular are used in teas, tinctures, infused oils, and herbal remedies.

And let's not forget that flowers can have a positive impact on mental health, as well. At the very least, the first blooms of spring feel like a much-deserved reward for making it through another winter.

Whatever your reason for wanting to grow more flowers, you're sure to love these nine flowers that thrive in the cooler weather typical of spring and fall in many places.

Our Favorite Flowers to Grow in the Cool Season

• ornamental alliums
• asters
• calendula
• chamomile
• dianthus
• pansies and violas
• poppies
• snapdragons

Alliums Love Cool Weather and Will Protect Your Leafy Greens

These beautiful flowers, also called ornamental onions, share many characteristics with their chive, garlic, and onions cousins, including their love of cooler weather and their distinctive smell that repels pests (including deer). Bees, however, love the pom-pom flower heads that grow on the tips of tall stems.

Plant alliums in the ground in the fall, and you'll be cutting blooms to display in your home in the spring.

Asters Are an Important Cool-Season Flower for Pollinators

There's a short poem called "Wild Asters" by Sara Teasdale that goes like this:

In the spring I asked the daisies

If his words were true,

And the clever, clear-eyed daisies

Always knew.

Now the fields are brown and barren, 

Bitter autumn blows,

And of all the stupid asters

Not one knows.

While I love this poem, I feel like it gives asters a bit of a bad rap. They're certainly not just some stupid flowers to the bees and butterflies that love the pollen or to the birds that count on aster seed heads for food. Plus, they're named for my favorite plant family, the Asteraceae family, which also contains all the lettuce varieties.

The poem does get right that asters grow really well in the fall. They can be planted in the ground in the spring after your final frost date.

Calendula Is Super Easy to Grow from Seed in Spring

This is a great flower to grow in your raised beds, in containers, or in the ground—anywhere you want to add some color and a cottage look. Calendula is easy to start from seed, and the blooms help maintain the overall health of your garden space.

Calendula, being in the Asteraceae family, loves the cool weather of spring and fall, but it can last through the summer months in some climates too. 

You can use calendula blooms to make your own calendula tea at home, and at the end of their growing season, you can save your own calendula seeds for next year.

Chamomile Grows Best in the Cool Season

Chamomile, another member of the Aster family, gives us cute daisy-like flowers. It's low-maintenance and easily self-seeds for the next growing season. I plant it in the spring after my final frost date has passed, harvest a lot of leaves in the fall, dry them, and brew them to make cozy teas for the winter to help me relax. Chamomile plants can survive a little frost but not a heavy freeze.

You can plant chamomile seeds in raised beds, containers, and even in-ground pollinator gardens. I love to plant chamomile on the edges of a raised bed so that the flowers can drape over the sides.

Find tips on growing your own chamomile from seed and making your own chamomile tea here.

Dianthus Can Bloom After Light Frost

Dianthus is a great flower to put in the corners of your raised beds, containers, or in-ground beds. The plants will continue to produce pink, white, or red flowers even after a light frost.

Even though dianthus is in the Carnation family, it's similar to flowering plants in the Aster family in that it loves cooler weather and might struggle in the heat. Prune your plants about a third back in the summer so that they can return in full vigor in the fall.

Pansies and Violas Add Color to Gardens in Spring and Fall

These little beauties have long been staples of flower beds and containers, but I also love to put them in the corners of raised garden beds to add much-needed pops of color during the colder parts of the year. The flowers thrive when temps are between 40 and 70 degrees, but they can hang on for light frosts, sometimes even bouncing back after single-digit freezes.

Though most of us think of grabbing little trays of pansies and violas in our favorite color combos from the garden center in the spring, you can also grow them from seed. Don't forget to harvest some of these edible blooms to brighten up your cool-season salads!

Poppies Need Cool Soil to Sprout

Poppies make me think of spring in Italy, but home gardeners can have their own bright red meadows—or little patches of red in their garden beds—too.

Poppies are one of those flowers that need to spend some time in cold weather before they will sprout and grow, which means they're best planted in the ground in the late fall or early winter. Poppies can tolerate frost and love cool weather.

Snapdragons Are the Perfect Cool-Weather Flowers to Grow for Cutting

Snapdragons are so incredibly beautiful in all of their many colors, and now you can choose between varieties that grow tall and newer varieties that trail. Like many of the flowers on this list, they bloom when the weather is on the chillier side and might stop producing new flowers when the weather warms too much.

Time to Plant Some Flowers

It'd be pretty cool if you added some of these cool-season flowers to your garden, don't you think?

Thanks for being here and helping make gardening ordinary once more!