Gardeners can retreat to a cool spot indoors when the temperature soars. Plants have to stay put. Fortunately, a surprising variety of flowers not only tolerate the heat, but thrive in it. Summertime is their prime time.

To be sure, you can't neglect the care of plants during hot, dry spells, but heat-tolerant plants, whether in flower beds or in big pots, don't need coddling.

"Heat tolerance is a really important trait for us because we all know that consumers don't always know about plant care and watering," says Claire Josephson, product marketing manager for PanAmerican Seed, a plant-breeding company that introduced Wave petunias -- among other top performers -- to the American market. "We are trying to breed bulletproof plants," Josephson says, "and the more risk we can take out, the better."

This year is the 25th anniversary of the Wave series of petunias, known for their nonstop color, spreading habit and versatility in beds and containers. But Wave petunias are only one example of flowers that bloom happily through the steamy days of summer. Pentas, salvias, dianthus, impatiens, vinca, begonias and many others keep the garden looking lively in temperatures that can cause people to melt. While you move to a shady spot on the patio or enjoy your view of the garden from a window, bright summer flowers keep producing fresh blooms in the hottest sun, and butterflies float in on warm summer breezes to visit them, too.

"What's exciting to me is there are more heat-tolerant flowers all the time," says Justin Hancock, horticultural craftsman at the plant brand Monrovia, and a big fan of summer flower color. "You get certain types of color in the summer that you just don't see in spring," he says. Angelonia is one of Hancock's absolute favorites, for its deep colors, spikey form and fragrant flowers. "They smell like sugar cookies," he says.

Breeders are often looking over their shoulders when they work to solve gardeners' problems -- they find inspiration and opportunity in well-known and beloved plants of the past that just need a modern touch of color and a shot of vigor to appeal to new gardeners. The Lucky Star series of pentas is an example. Lucky Star is relatively new, and Josephson is excited about it for its continuous blooming habit, great colors, compact size and pollinator-friendly flowers. Each flower head is made up of hundreds of small blooms. Pentas make a big impression from a distance, and the many tiny flowers are also charming up close. Previous generations of pentas bloomed in cycles. With these plants, "you're never without color," Josephson says.

Old-fashioned vincas are back in style these days, too, Josephson says, in part thanks to PanAm's Tattoo series, which introduced a bold palette emphasizing fruit colors (tangerine, papaya, raspberry, black cherry). They have caught on with young gardeners and are now among the company's top sellers, she says.

Putting together great combinations of long-blooming plants is a specialty of the plant brand Proven Winners, which shares inspiration with gardeners in annual idea books featuring landscape ideas and combos for pots and hanging baskets. For consistent summer color when the weather is sizzling hot, lantanas are hard to beat, and Proven Winners combinations make the most of these tough plants. Verbenas, which start blooming in late spring and keep going through summer and into fall, are also easy, hard-working stars of container or flower-bed plantings, and favorites of PW designers. Verbenas and lantanas are both terrific butterfly plants.

Colorful foliage plants have a lot to contribute to summer gardens, too, says Penny Merritt-Price, research coordinator at Young's Plant Farm, a wholesale nursery in Auburn, Alabama. The plant farm maintains an All-America Selections test garden, and Merritt-Price is a judge, rating the performance of hundreds of plants every year, comparing new introductions and recommending top plants for AAS awards.

"Coleus are awesome," she says, and she's right: They're colorful, tough and versatile, and they don't need flowers to make a garden sparkle. "They really lighten up a space in the shade -- and they're great in blazing sun, too," Merritt-Price says. Breeders have introduced dozens of coleus varieties, dwarf and tall coleus, with interesting foliage shapes and intense colors from deep red to chartreuse.

Merritt-Price also likes sweet-potato vines as ground-cover or accent foliage plants. Her favorites are the compact Sweet Georgia Heart series and the Spotlight series of vines. Previous generations of sweet-potato vines were fast-growing plants that were inclined to take over a flower bed, flowerpot, or hanging basket. New varieties look lush and luxurious, but they're well-behaved companions and will not run rampant through your carefully designed planting combinations.

It's never too late in the season to pump up the color in your flower beds or pots with new plants, especially when there are so many great choices. Garden shops and the garden departments of big-box stores are committed to keeping their inventories up this summer, to meet increased demand as families spend more time at home. Hot-weather plants available now will have your garden soaring through the rest of the gardening season: They're hotter than a heat wave.

THE BASICS

-- You don't need advanced gardening skills to take care of summer flowers.

-- Encourage full-time bloom with a little fertilizer. Sprinkle slow-release fertilizer in flowerpots or around annuals in flower beds, or use with a water-soluble fertilizer every two weeks.

-- Water regularly. Poke a finger into the soil around your plants. If it feels dry, it's time to water.

SOURCES

Get to know new plants on the websites of breeders and propagators.

-- PanAm's breeders have introduced an astonishing variety of seed-grown bedding plants. panamseed.com

-- Monrovia's designers call annual flowers "the eye candy of the summer garden." monrovia.com

-- The Proven Winners brand emphasizes tough, beautiful plants, with plenty of offerings for hot-season heroes. Their newsletter and idea book are especially inspiring. provenwinners.com

-- All-America Selections works with breeders to test and promote new flowers and vegetable varieties. Many gardens in the AAS network of almost 200 test gardens across the country are open to the public. You can find a test garden and learn more about AAS winners, which have been recognized since 1932. all-americaselections.org

There's a big difference between a well-designed garden and a garden that sparkles -- and it's in the details. Getting things in just the right place and taking advantage of opportunities are what bring a garden design to life.

Good designers "have a sense of scale and proportion and circulation," says James Drzewiecki, a landscape designer and owner of Ginkgo Leaf Studio in Cedarburg, Wisconsin. "And when you have good details, even if they are subtle, people pick up on that."

Drzewiecki never has to look far for inspiration in the gardens he designs. "I look at the house first," he says, picking up visual cues that suggest the ideal location for beds and pathways. The choice of materials for hardscaping in a garden design often echoes the materials in a house, he says, and gives the garden a feeling of belonging in the place.

In an award-winning garden near Milwaukee, Drzewiecki reimagined a client's front yard, adding functional and artful details designed to make the space more modern and welcoming. Bluestone pavers set in slate-chip mulch, placed adjacent to the driveway, give passengers a comfortable place to step in and out of a car without stepping in flower beds. Along the front walk, a pad of irregularly shaped field stones reflects the home's Prairie-style architecture and creates what Drzewiecki calls "a pausing point" in the landscape. It's a skillful touch: Instead of coming in on a runway of a front walk, visitors immediately find themselves in the midst of a gracious garden landscape.

Wickie Rowland, a landscape designer and creative director at Design and Landscapes by Labrie Associates in North Hampton, New Hampshire, relies on design details to create movement in a garden.

Rowland designed a sweeping stone walkway with a generously proportioned curved seating wall on the waterfront of a client's property, an expansive gesture that pulls the eye into the landscape. Behind the wall, her design called for a row of wispy plantings, just enough to soften and highlight the edge without blocking the view. A fancy garden gate, which borrows architectural details from the home, marks an entrance but also keeps deer out of the vegetable beds on the other side.

In another garden, Rowland used an unexpected combination of boulders, pea gravel and field stones in her design of the hardscape, but limited the color palette to warm brown tones. Even though the materials are texturally very different from one another, the color choice "marries it all together, so it makes sense," she says.

Details strongly reinforce design decisions, Rowland says, describing the great care an installation crew took to place clipped boxwood globes around a client's perfectly symmetrical rose garden. "The pathways had to line up just so, and the boxwoods all needed to be the same distance from the edging," she says. "You may not notice consciously when the smaller details have been paid attention to, but there's a sense of extra pleasure in seeing a project like that."

In small projects, details are particularly important, says Ryan Prange, a landscape architect and the founder of Falling Waters Landscape in Encinitas, in Southern California, where small lots are typical. They have their own challenges, Prange says. In tiny spaces, design elements frequently have to do double duty, solving problems (and hiding them) while giving clients beautiful spaces for the outdoor lifestyle they're dreaming of.

On a tiny lot just north of Encinitas, Prange met with a client who needed a solution to periodic flooding but also wanted a home office off the deck, a place to entertain, and privacy from the street. Water problems had to be addressed first. "We talked about everything -- from lifting the house to rebuilding," Prange says. In the end, they excavated, creating swales and depressions in the landscape and lining them with rocks and water-tolerant plants. A company that specializes in water systems contributed valuable technical expertise, but Prange's design details, including a recirculating fountain that seems to spill into one of the swales, and a footbridge over a catchment area inspired by the experience of a similar bridge in Yosemite Valley, set the project apart.

"Sometimes a problem can be hidden with a pot or a plant, but there are also times when I say, 'This is going to be a neat moment' -- and everything needs to work together," Prange says. "It all matters a lot to me."

Great garden designs respond to site and situation, solve problems, and manage to make it all look beautiful, inviting and natural. It may look effortless, but the details are hard at work everywhere you look.

SOURCES

The website of the Association of Professional Landscape Designers (apld.org) is a great place to look for examples of award-winning garden designs, and to find a designer in your area.

These designers are among many APLD members whose work has been recognized with APLD design awards:

-- James Drzewiecki, Ginkgo Leaf Studio, ginkgoleafstudio.net.

-- Wickie Rowland, Design and Landscapes by Labrie Associates, labrieassociates.com.

-- Ryan Prange, Falling Waters Landscape, fallingwaterslandscape.com

There's a lot at stake in vegetable gardens this year -- new gardeners have seized the moment to plant kitchen-garden favorites, and they're eager to experience the delicious taste of success.

Sales of both seed packets and small transplant-sized starts of tomatoes, peppers, cucumbers, squash and other summer vegetables soared this spring as stay-at-home and safe-at-home guidelines changed the way we all live and work. Sheltering in place turned out to be the inspiration for so many new vegetable gardens that the National Garden Bureau, which is celebrating 100 years of promoting home gardening, launched a modern Victory Garden campaign based on the World War II backyard-gardening initiative.

The NGB's founder, James Burdett, wrote the original Victory Garden manual back in 1943, and "it just seemed like a natural for us" to take up the cause again, says Diane Blazek, executive director of NGB and its sister organization, All-America Selections, which tests new vegetable and flower varieties and recognizes top performers with AAS awards. More than anything, she says, "we want people to be successful."

Success can be measured in many ways. Nothing tastes better than a just-picked tomato you eat right out of your hand in your own backyard. A fistful of green beans you've grown yourself is more delicious than any bean you can buy. But tending a vegetable garden also gives you an excuse to step away from all the demands on us, even at the best of times, and cultivate a relationship with nature. Over the course of the summer, your emotional harvests may include the thrill of seeing tiny seedlings emerge from the soil, the wonder of finding the first fruits on a squash plant, and the delight of pulling home-grown carrots out of the ground.

In the 1940s, backyard gardens were quite large, and families -- on average -- grew almost 40% of the fruits and vegetables they ate. But you don't need a 60-foot row of corn, kale or potatoes to earn your modern gardening chops. Even in a small garden, you can produce a gratifyingly impressive harvest. Try planting lettuce in a hanging basket, tomatoes or squash in a big pot on the patio, or cucumbers to grow up a trellis against the garage wall. Make room for parsley around the edge of a flower garden and grow dill among a patch of zinnias. On a balcony, you can grow strawberries, radishes or cherry tomatoes.

Gardeners always have questions, and the National Garden Bureau is helping gardeners with extra support from plant breeders and other expert vegetable gardeners this year, including advice on growing tomatoes, peppers, melons, strawberries, and other favorites. The NBG's website is full of inspiration, advice, encouragement, ideas, recommendations and links to planning tools for gardeners at every level of experience. All-America Selections emphasizes modern hybrids. Heirloom varieties are popular for their great flavor, but new hybrids often have heirloom flavor built in, and they resist diseases better and are much more productive than older varieties, Blazek says. Staying up to date with hybrids gives you an edge.

Seed suppliers, including Burpee, Johnny's Selected Seeds, Territorial Seed Co. and others, also have articles on their websites to address gardeners' questions and coach them through the growing season to a successful and satisfying harvest. Bonnie Plants, whose vegetable transplants of all kinds are commonly available at big-box stores, has well-researched garden guides for individual crops on its website, as well as ideas for small gardens, edible landscaping and raised-bed gardening, among other topics. Local garden shops, community gardens and university extension offices, with their master gardener hotlines, are also ready and eager to help. This is an opportunity they don't want to miss.

In her own small urban garden in the Chicago area, Blazek grows half a dozen different tomato plants, varieties she can't find in local grocery stores or even at farmer's markets. "I plant some of the unique things," she says, such as orange tomatoes and super-sweet cherry and grape tomatoes. She likes "cool, Mad Hatter-shaped peppers" and plants lots of arugula -- reminding herself every year that the crop really needs to be thinned out ruthlessly to produce lots of big, delicious, leaves.

Blazek also grows flowers for pollinator insects, like bees and butterflies and a million other bugs, which in turn enhance the yield of her vegetable garden. Pollinators are nature's heroes. Flowers obviously also make her garden more beautiful.

Every gardener experiences occasional setbacks, but "usually, if something goes wrong, you shouldn't blame yourself," Blazek says. A green thumb isn't a prerequisite for success, and there is help around every corner. This year, in particular, the investment in a package of seeds, a few small plants and some time to tend them has never seemed more promising.

SOURCES

-- No one gardens alone: Friendly, expert help for vegetable gardeners at every level of experience is just a few clicks away. The National Garden Bureau (ngb.org) and All-America Selections (all-americaselections.org) are great places to start.

-- These mail-order seed companies (and many others) also stock their websites with planning ideas and growing tips: Territorial Seed Company (territorialseed.com), Burpee (burpee.com), Johnny's Selected Seeds (johnnyseeds.com).

-- Bonnie Plants sells garden-ready transplants at big-box stores. The company has particularly good "how to grow" and general gardening sections on its website (bonnieplants.com).

-- Blogs can be another excellent source of support and inspiration. You might start with the websites of Megan Cain (creativevegetablegardener.com) and Doug Oster (dougoster.com). Cain and Oster are both experienced gardeners, and their advice is thoughtful, reliable and encouraging.