Houston's growing calendar doesn't look like the national gardening guidance, and communities that plant on the wrong calendar pay for it in replacements. The region's two real planting windows are fall (October–November) and early spring (February–April) — and for most permanent material, fall is the better one.
Trees and shrubs: plant in fall
Fall-planted trees and shrubs get six cool, wet months to build roots before facing their first Gulf Coast summer. Spring-planted material gets ten weeks. Establishment failure — the dead installs that plague commercial landscape work — is overwhelmingly a summer-survival problem, and fall planting is the cheapest insurance there is. If your community is planning entry renovations or screening plantings, bid the work in late summer and install in October–November.
Turf: plant in late spring
Warm-season turf (St. Augustine, Bermuda, zoysia) establishes fastest when soil is warm and days are long — April through June is the sod window. Sod laid in late fall sits dormant, roots slowly, and washes or dies over winter at much higher rates. Avoid major sod projects October–February unless there's no choice; if winter sod is unavoidable, budget extra irrigation attention and expect touch-up.
Seasonal color: two to three rotations
- Warm-season rotation (April–May install): pentas, lantana, vinca, purslane, angelonia, coleus in shade — material that takes 95°F without collapsing.
- Cool-season rotation (October–November install): pansies, violas, snapdragons, dianthus, ornamental kale and cabbage — material that takes frost.
- The dead zones are August (too hot to establish anything) and January (too cold). Rotations timed to those months waste money.
Perennials and natives
The Gulf Coast native and adapted palette — muhly grass, salvias, rudbeckia, coneflower, Turk's cap, lantana — delivers color with a fraction of the water and replacement cost of annual beds. Fall planting, again, wins. Many communities are converting outlying color beds to perennial and native plantings and concentrating annual-color dollars at the monuments where they're actually seen; the companion articles on seasonal color rotations and common-area rejuvenation cover how to phase that.
The calendar in one line
Permanent material in fall, turf in late spring, color in April and October — and any proposal that ignores those windows deserves a question about who pays for the replacements.