Kniphofias are one my Red Garden joys: the hot orange, yellow, and red spikes of flowers are unique in hardy perennials. And because the plants so often succumb to wetness in the Winter, they are oddities indeed here in New England. (I do some Extreme Mulching to get them through.)
This season, 'Alcazar' is better than ever, partly just because the clump is another year older.
Six spikes at once! The burnt-orange flowers, with only a bit of yellow in the oldest (at the bottom), are a vivid but not cacaphonous adjunct to the red of the nearby Jacob Cline monarda.
And the height and intensity of Alcazar is also great filler before dahlias (out of sight to the back of it) get going in August.
This is the sister clump, across the pathway. Yes: TEN spikes at once!

If Giacometti had designed perennials instead of sculpture,
this would be one of his greatest:
Asian burnet is so distinctive, to elongatedly elegant, that I have it right by the path to my back door: It's a star, worthy of such prime real estate. Strong straight-arrow, nearly leafless flower stems shoot up almost five feet.
They filigree the foreground, so are the perfect front detail to embellish long-distance views.
The leaves themselves are almost all at the base, and they are a narrow ferny bunch. (The latin is Sanguisorba tenuifolia, where tenuifolia means, literally, "narrow leaves". Think "tenui" like "tenuous" or "attenuated": all mean, one way or another, narrow, thin, stretched.)

The quirky pendant bottle-brush flowers are the Dr. Seuss touch.
Intriguing and even comical, they are the dancing levity atop all this startlingly-severe and anorexic geometry.
Normally in burgundy, pink, or red, this white-flowered form keeps elegance at least in coloring if not in habit. As with all the burnets, tangential pollinators like flies and small wasps are the chosen few, not the usual mainstream bees. Even here, then, the perennial is proud in its iconoclasm.

It's bee-balm season, finally. I say "finally" because I only (at the moment) have one bee-balm, Jacob Cline, and it's the early star of my Red Garden.
(OK, more honestly, the Red Garden isn't very red, at least broadly, until August, when the dahlias and the trumpet vines really get going. I'm working on this, trust me. Bee-balm, late in June, is the "early" indicator that this is, in fact a "red" garden.)
Jacob Cline is the best bee-balm to start with, because unlike so many of the tribe, it never, never, never gets powdery mildew. How's this for a disgusting Wiki-image of P-M on a gourd leaf? Powdery, slippery, slippery in the rainy: When a plant has powdery mildew, it's Pretty Much Slimed-up.
Yuck. Even "mildew-resistant" bee-balms can get PMS: They ain't mildew-proof. But Jacob Cline? Even though I do nothing to prepare for or fight off PMS—no thinning out of the stems to increase air flow, no spraying of anything to kill of an early outbreak, no extra watering in case there's a drought and the famously water-friendly bee-balm would become stressed and therefore more mildew-susceptible—Jacob is free and clear the entire season. So, I say: Grow this bee-balm! Then there won't be any PMS in your Red Garden either. Jacob Cline lets you enjoy what you're supposed to about bee-balms: the long long season of perky big-impact flowers.
My colony has started into bloom just this week, so the display is still young. But it's intense anyway. No staking, no pinching, no dead-heading either. No nothing, just week after week after week of eager cooperative bloom, and month after month of disease-free (but, true, like all bee-balms, boring) green foliage beneath.
The other thrill of bee-balm can be, if you're of the thinking sort, inferred right from the flowers.

Can you see that the perky "You called, boss? Anything I can do for you sir?" flower clusters are made up of individual prong-shaped flowers, one prong up, one prong down? A bit closer look, and with better light to show you how red Jacob really is:

Each flower is like a narrow jaw flung wide open, with the black nostrils (the pollen actually) at the top, and the deep deep throat opened up in the center.
So: Red flowers in warm weather. Red flowers that are deep and tubular (work with me here: throaty is "tubular"). Yup: Bee-balm should really be called Hummer-heaven: the little guys just go wild for it.
Bullet-proof culture, six week, or is it two months or more? of great flowers, guaranteed visits by hummingbirds: Jacob Cline is a Summer star.

As I posted yesterday, Pink is a high mountain to climb. There just isn't that much of it, especially if you've backed yourself into such a spacious corner as I have: My Pink Borders are sixty feet long, and yes, there are two.
So for me, pink includes anything else that goes with pink too: white, burgundy, silver, blue. If it fits, even tangentially, I'll take it.
Here's a white perennial, galega, that I'd never grown before. It seems just about perfect to me: almost four feet all, with eager fresh-green foliage that nobody eats, on stems that no one needs to stake. And it thrives in the heavy and often water-logged soil too. But of course, practical considerations are nothing if the plant isn't pleasing. No worries here: Could those white spikes of flowers be any more scintillating? They are about six inches long.
As always, there's a snake in this Garden of Eden: Out West, galega self-seeds horribly. (It was introduced out West because it's great forage—but you can't prove it by me. Then again, if my colony were outside the deer-fenced gardens, maybe it would be chewed to the ground tomorrow.) I've had no such self-seeding here in New England, and my beds are so large that they are weeded only sporadically: It's not like my galega doesn't have plenty of opportunity. It's so gorgeous I'd welcome some volunteers, actually. As is, I'll divide it instead to establish a colony in the other Pink Border. Only a dozen or two other indomitable successes, whatever the color, and my "Pink" Borders will finally be full.
BTW: Galega comes in—yes—pink, as well as pale blue. I'll get to planting more galegas next year.

It's a point of honor that, while I much prefer white or blue or burgundy or red or yellow or orange to pink, I nonetheless must have a pair of kick-ass Pink Borders just to prove that, yeah, I can still do it fabulously even though I don't particularly want to. One reason I get exasperated with the World of Pink is that there's not that much of it (at least compared to white or yellow). You need to look under every rock, to accept and even celebrate whatever scrap of pink you can find.
OK. I'm up for it. I signed on for the mission, and damn it I'm going to get to the goal.
And besides, then I have that much more opportunity to look under every rock, to find and then grow oddball stuff that I might otherwise not.
Like this surprising elderberry, Sambucus ebulus.
Unlike every other member of this shrubby tribe, it's a perennial. The pinnate leaves and flat heads of white flowers are the dead give-away: We're in Elderberry Country here. Plus the flat heads of dark blue berries that (I hear) they mature to. So far, my colony seems uninterested in fruiting. What put this perennial sambucus into my Pink Borders, though, is the pollen. It's pink.
Click on this marvelous Wiki-picture for a close look. Click again to get eyeball-to-pink-pollen. Pink-eyed, as it were.
And to think, it I hadn't gritted my teeth and committed to the Pink Borders, I wouldn't have ever known about pink pollen. Whew. Glad I was open to the experience.

The usual pink-flowered foxgloves cause my fingers to drum on the desk. Yes, the spikes of flowers have the English it-will-never-get-truly-hot early Summer lushness. (But yes, they often need a bit of staking.) And yes, I like how they very considerately die after flowering, getting out of the way for the hot-weather show of the heat-lovers that make the July, August, and September garden such a thrill. Just let one or two die in peace, to ripen seed, and you'll have pink foxgloves forever.
But, they are pink. And that limits them to the few places (I hope) where you don't also have a lot of fun yellow and chartreuse foliage. Why not a foxglove that loves to pal around with yellow? Then you could have foxgloves anywhere, no matter what other colors were happening. Here's the answer: Digitalis 'Flashing Spires'. Narrow all-green leaves and narrow spikes of pale-yellow flowers are both self-supporting. (Take that, pink foxgloves.) And the color goes as well with pink as it does with red or yellow or orange. (Take that, pink foxgloves.)
Yes indeedy, Flashing Spires self-seeds with gusto. But the plants are very easy to yank, or (if by some miracle you don't have Flashing Spires everywhere) transplant.
Like all foxgloves, deer avoid them completely. And Flashing Spires comes absolutely true from seed, so your spires will always be the same soft-yellow. (Take that, pink foxgloves, whose offspring vary from white to pink to rose.)
I've had Flashing Spires for year (and years), and in forty years or so, look forward to passing it on to my inheritors.

Now that we're, uh, budding experts on pot look-alikes, this one is too easy, too crude by half.
False Hemp is a huge—to eight feet high, six across—perennial for huge borders like this one, or for to-the-front focal statements in smaller plantings when you want to razz the cops.
At a glance (or if you're toked up already), there is something druggy or at least doubtful about False Hemp.

The feathery pinnate leaves are attractive, you have to admit. But aren't they smokeable? Or at least a bit too "native" for proper gardens? I don't know about the smoke-ability, but they sure aren't those of pot, which (we now know) are palmate instead—all the leaflets attach at the same point, like your fingers to your palm. False Hemp leaves are "pinnate" instead: all the leaflets attach to a long central spine.
Well what about those buds? They're suspicious for sure.
Wrong again: they lengthen into a veritable curtain of greenish whatevers.
Pot flower clusters stay distinctly upright, unlike pot users of course.
(Thank you www.Crocus.co.uk for the pair of full-flowered pix. We can always count on our fellow plant-geeks across the pond to be up on everything possible in the garden.)
But one thing you are right about: False Hemp is native of one of those druggy "stans": Pakistan. Guilt by association anyone?
Another druggy muddle here: that common name "False Hemp". Hemp is Cannabis sativa sativa is , a close cousin of the smokeable stuff, Cannabis sativa indica, but without the active ingredient to make smoking it worth the trouble. Police take note: It would be self-incriminating let alone embarrassing to get riled up over datisca: Would you be thinking datisca were pot because you were so buzzed already you couldn't tell the difference? Or just so ignorant you couldn't tell the difference?
If ever there were a latin name to use with complete innocence, at full volume, it's that of False Hemp: Datisca cannabina. Say it loud, say it proud: "duh-TISK-uh cuh-NAB-in-uh". As in: "Oh that? That's my Datisca cannabina. Lovely isn't it? So delicate—and so under-used." And then, a tisk-tisk-tisk will let everyone know that you, at least, are up to the challenge of bringing this unaccountably scarce and rarely-seen plant to wider reknown.
Last off-kilter detail: Crocus.co.uk gives a common name for datisca of "Bastard Hemp." Leave it to the Brits to work in the improper heritage angle too.
PS: I myself will be using Datisca in my vast Yellow Borders, when the economy picks up enough that I can convince myself, let alone my husband, that another $50 K spent on the garden is just the wise decision to make.