Southampton - What is so pleasant as a summer evening spent outdoors? We can enjoy the cool night air, dine al fresco, sip a glass of wine with friends or do some stargazing. If you like to spend time outside after dark, you can add a few special touches to your landscape to enhance the mood. Here are some tips.

Add Lights
If you want to be outdoors at night you need lights in the landscape, and on and around your deck or patio. Lights are practical, of course - you need to be able to follow paths, climb stairs safely, see what you're cooking or eating. But lighting helps to create a mood, too. Uplighting a tree, sculpture or fountain highlights these features and creates drama. String some party lights above a deck or around an umbrella and you've immediately got a festive atmosphere.

Four o'clock. (wordpress.com)

Use White Flowers
As daylight fades, so do the colors of the garden. The world at night looks mostly black and white to us. If you're going to be out in your garden at night, bright reds and purples that are so bold during the day will look mostly gray. But white flowers begin to glow as the sun sets, and remain visible longer than other flowers as dusk descends. After dark, white flowers will pick up nearby lights. So plant white flowers close to your deck or patio, or other spaces you're likely to inhabit after dark.

Night Bloomers
If you do your gardening during the day and love the colors of flowers, the garden after dark can be a revelation. It's a whole different world. And it's even better when it includes some alluring vespertine (night-blooming) flowers. Some flowers unfurl their petals after dark to attract particular pollinators (in many cases night-flying moths).

Nocturnal flowers bring mystery and intrigue to the garden after dark. Many of them are white, so you'll be able to see them, and they're often sweetly, hauntingly, fragrant as well. In addition, white-flowered day bloomers such as gardenias, nicotiana and jasmines are fragrant at night. The night garden can be full of intoxicating scents.

Many of these plants hail from tropical climes and won't survive a Long Island winter outdoors. But some can come indoors and be happy as houseplants over winter, then move back outside when the weather warms again in spring. For the others, well, treat them as annuals and enjoy them for the summer. Then buy new ones next year.

Moonflower. (landscapedia.info)

Night-Bloomers To Grow
Here are some night-blooming beauties to grow close to or on your deck or patio to enhance those delightful summer evenings. Local nurseries carry many of them, and others are available from online sources.

 • Citron daylily (Hemerocallis citrina), a night-blooming daylily (and a horticultural oxymoron), with fragrant greenish yellow to lemon yellow blossoms.

 • Lemon lily (Hemerocallis lilioasphodelus), another nocturnal daylily, with fragrant flowers of bright lemon yellow.

 • Four o'clock (Mirabilis jalapa), an old-fashioned annual that opens late in the day and comes in a range of colors. Look for it in heirloom seed catalogs.

 • Night gladiolus (Gladiolus tristis), very fragrant, soft yellow flowers. Grow it as an annual, or dig the corms in fall and store them in the basement over winter like other gladiolus. Plant them out again next spring.

 • Fragrant plantain lily (Hosta plantaginea), a green-leaved hosta with wonderfully fragrant white flowers in late summer. This one's a perennial here.

Evening Stock. (wikimedia.org)

 • Jasmine (Jasminum species), jasmines are day bloomers, but they can open their flowers at night and release their sweet scent - I had one for years that woke me up in the middle of the night with the fragrance of its newly opened flowers. Arabian jasmine (Jasminum sambac) is intensely sweet; poet's jasmine (Jasminum officinale) has a lighter, fresher perfume.

 • Moonflower (Ipomoea alba), a nocturnal morning glory, this plant is a vine with deliciously fragrant, large white trumpet flowers opening late in the day and closing in the morning. It's glorious on a trellis in combination with Heavenly Blue morning glories, which open in the morning when the moonflowers close. Try it!

 • Evening stock (Matthiola longipetala subspecies bicornus), an annual that bears clusters of pink, purple and mauve flowers that are intoxicating at night, with a spicy-sweet scent.

 • Yucca (Yucca species), a familiar sight in many East End gardens, the clump of sword-shaped leaves produces a tall, stiff stalk decked with fragrant, white, bell-shaped flowers in summer.

 • Fragrant At Night
These plants aren't specifically night bloomers, but their fragrance is delicious - and magnified - at night: honeysuckle, wax plant (Hoya carnosa), flowering tobacco (Nicotiana) and heliotrope.

Wax Plant. (home.hiroshima.com)