10 Tall Perennial Flowers

Grow a living privacy fence. Hide an ugly view. Plant a stand of tall perennial flowers to screen your yard from the world. These big plants are also good to make a dramatic backdrop in a garden. Here’s a list of tall garden flowers:

Hardy Hibiscus

This perennial shrub grows 7 to 9 feet tall, as big as an ornamental tree. It produces showy flowers in red, pink and white, a foot in diameter. The only thing this giant has in common with its fragile, tropical kin is its exotic looking blooms. It can survive winters as far north as Zone 5.

Oriental Lily

Hardy beauties grow from 4 to 6 feet tall and bear big, showy flowers in white, red and pink. They’re sweet-smelling, tall perennial flowers that are great for bouquets. 

Delphinium

These old-fashioned, tall garden flowers produces spikes of blooms in color-saturated tones of blue, pink, purple and white. The biggest varieties can reach 6 feet tall. 

Joe Pye Weed

Butterflies love these tall perennial plants and you will, too, if you’re looking for big. Joe Pye grows up to 7 feet tall and 4 feet wide. It bears clusters of pale pink-purple flowers that smell like vanilla. 

Cutleaf Coneflower 

The cutleaf is not a coneflower at all. It’s in the same family as black-eyed susans. It  can grow to a towering 9 feet tall and is covered with yellow, daisy-like flowers with coneflower-like drooping petals and domed center disks. 

Hollyhock

A staple of cottage gardens, hollyhock will bring old-fashioned beauty to your perennial border. Hollyhocks produce blooms in hot pink, red, white or black on 6 to 8-foot-tall spires. Technically it’s a biennial, but it self-sows and multiplies, so you shouldn’t need to replant. 

Canna

Cannas look tropical, but they’re winter hardy to zone 7. These perennial flowers grow as tall as 6 feet, with big, paddle-shaped leaves and blooms in red, orange, yellow, cream and bicolors. 

Maximillian Sunflower

These look like their annual cousins, but they bloom in late summer and keep making flowers in the fall. Maximillians grow 4 to 7 feet tall and produce branches full of sunny yellow flowers.

Red Hot Poker

This exotic looking plant grows 3 to 4 feet tall and works well in groupings in the back of a perennial bed. Spikes of red, yellow, white or orange tube-shaped flowers grow from grassy, gray-green foliage. 

Foxglove 

The tall spires of foxgloves are a vision. They grow as tall as 8 feet and produce tube-shaped flowers in blue, pink or white with deep purple spots on their throats. Technically they’re biennials, meaning they’ll live two years and die. But they’re enthusiastic re-seeders and will act like tall perennial plants, coming back for years.