We East Enders, whether we are here year round or just for the summer, love our gardens. The rich blue flowers of hydrangeas are summer icons, their lovely blossoms echoing the sky above. And fall brings masses of Montauk daisies.

Colorful flowers in a summer garden are pure delight and for many of us, an essential part of the joy of the season. Consider the rich blue hydrangeas and the multitudes of roses in shades of red, pink, orange, yellow and white that are blooming across the East End now. Adding fragrance to the garden palette deepens and enriches our appreciation of flowers. Of our five senses, smell delivers the richest and most enduring experience.

Perennial flowers are favorites of so many gardeners and landscape designers for good reason. Unlike annuals like impatiens and geraniums, perennials come back year after year to bring their lovely colors to the garden.

Surrounding your home with a beautiful landscape not only integrates your home into its setting and enhances the view from your windows; studies have shown repeatedly that good landscaping also enhances property values.

We live in a fast-paced world and sometimes we just need to slow down. You can’t always take a vacation, but you can take a break, right where you live. Moments of peace and serenity can be as close as your back door. Here are some ways to create your own peaceful haven in your own backyard.

Whether you spend time in your East End home during the summer season or all year round, privacy is probably important to you. And it seems harder to come by all the time. There’s more traffic on the roads. The quiet of a weekend morning is often shattered by whining leaf blowers and buzzing lawnmowers. The right landscaping can give you more privacy. Plants can serve the same purpose as a fence or high wall, but they can do it in a softer, more attractive way.

Vines are seldom the stars of the garden or landscape, but  they play important supporting roles in many successful landscapes. Vines enhance the focal points and features of the garden, and in the right location at the right time of year can have their chance to shine, too.  You might choose a flowering perennial climber such as clematis or trumpet creeper or climbing roses to bring glorious color to the garden for several weeks in spring or summer, year after year.

It’s time to savor the warm weather and glorious sunsets of summertime on the East End. After the seemingly endless bitter cold and snow we endured here this past winter, it’s time to unleash our inner beach bum. One way to make the most of summer this year, even when you’re not at the beach, is to create your own little tropical paradise at home.

In summer on the East End we revel in color, from the sea and sand, of course, and from the flowers that fill gardens everywhere. A big flower garden can be a lot of work, but you can get a lot of dazzle for not a lot of work with two classic summer flowers that you can plant in spring and enjoy in summer.

Peonies. Maybe you’ve never heard of them. Maybe your grandmother grew them. But if you don’t have them in your landscape or flower garden, take another look. They bloom for just a few weeks in spring, but oh, what flowers! Big, round, sumptuous balls of wide petals in so many shades of red, rose, pink and white, with a beguiling sweet fragrance. They rule the garden, and they make wonderful cut flowers, too.