As the weather gets cooler, our summer annuals start to fade, and many people turn to mums to put some color back into their flowerbeds. Mums, asters and flowering cabbage have all been popular fall standards in the garden.

Every September thousands of them get planted to create beautiful fall displays until the snow starts to fly. But many mums and asters are perennial and will come back next year if you know what to look for. You see, when these plants come back the following year, they don't look like the beautiful plants that you planted the previous season, they look like weeds and are usually pulled out of the flowerbed.

The mums and asters you see in the garden centers this time of year are not in their natural state, they have been pruned many times over to attain that bushy flower covered effect. When these plants are grown by the nurseries there is a lot of care to get them looking the way they do. Plants are grown from cuttings to make sure they are the color wanted, many mums that come back a second year will start to revert back to their natural color which is in the yellow to orange range.

Years ago, my mother-in-law in Connecticut had a large bed of mums that grew every year, but all reverted back to yellow over time even though she usually planted red or pink mums. Mums and asters normally grow to be around three feet tall and typically only have two or three stems so to get them short and bushy when they start growing and get up to around five inches tall, they get cut back to three inches. This gets them to start bushing out instead of growing upward. Likewise, when they get to seven inches tall, they get cut back again to around five inches and some sometimes they may get a third cutting at around nine inches back to seven inches.

Each time they are cut back they continue to bush out producing more stems that will eventually have flowers on them. Left uncut they would just get to about two and a half to three feet tall with just a couple flowers. In fact, asters can be found all along the roadsides growing wild this time of year if you know what to look for.

There is no real difference between wild asters and the type you would buy in the store except that the ones in the store have been meticulously pruned to produce a low bushy shape that encourages enhanced blooming. Wild asters would do the same thing if someone cut them back through the growing season. These plants will come back year after year but like I said earlier, most people weed them out of their flowerbeds each spring.

To prevent this from happening try tying a piece of ribbon or string loosely around the main stem of the plant when you plant it so that you can identify where the plant was last fall so you will know in the spring. Many people won't just cut off the dead top in the spring instead just pulling it out of the ground. If you just cut off the top, nine times out of ten they will regrow when the weather starts to warm again. But they do need to get cut back at those intervals to produce beautiful flowers again in the fall and many people just don't want the hassle and end up buying fresh mums and asters each fall. That is why they are the most popular of all fall flowers.

Other fall flowers that you may find available are pansies, Montauk daisies, Japanese millet and even kale (which is just a pretty leaf). All of these flowers will help brighten up any fall display with straw, pumpkins, Indian corn and corn stalks.