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Here’s how to design a garden that glows after dark.

Moon gardens rely on the senses to create a welcoming, magical space in your nighttime landscape. These gardens incorporate white or light-colored flowers and foliage that reflect the light of the moon or landscape lighting, as well as fragrant plants that offer another layer of enjoyment to your garden. Moon gardens also support beneficial nighttime pollinators, such as moths. A cozy spot adjacent to your seating area is ideal for a moon garden because you’ll enjoy both the sight and scent of your night-blooming plants.

To round out your garden, plant annuals, perennials and flowering shrubs with a succession of bloom times so that you’ll have color throughout the season. This also allows you to enjoy your outdoor space not only during the heat of summer, but also during the cooler evenings of autumn. Massing plantings of white flowers and foliage also has more impact than placing one plant here and there throughout the garden.

Like any other garden design, select perennials and shrubs that are suited for surviving winters in your USDA Hardiness zone (find yours here). Most importantly, make sure plants receive the correct light. For example, full sun is six or more hours of direct sunlight per day. Most flowering plants need a minimum of direct sun in order to bloom well. Finally, adding layers of lighting, whether strings of fairy lights, LED lanterns, or walkway lighting to enhance safety are another way to increase the nighttime beauty of your moon garden. Here are our favorite moon garden plants.

The soft, silvery foliage of this perennial adds texture as well as reflects nighttime light. Lamb's ear develops tall spikes of flowers in mid-summer, so you’ll support pollinators, too.

This spring-blooming shrub has the most enticing scent! Look for dwarf varieties that max out around 5 feet tall and wide, and use as a privacy screen.

This annual is a must-have because it blooms non-stop from spring to a heavy frost. It’s amazing cascading from window boxes, baskets, and over stone walls, and its honey-sweet fragrance is delightful. Plus, pollinators adore it.

With hundreds of types of hostas in all sizes, this sturdy perennial is incredible when massed on a shady hillside. Although they require mostly shade, they’ll show off better color when they get a bit of morning sun.

This low-growing perennial is extremely cold-hardy so it returns reliably year after year. The pale green foliage is dusted with silver, and it has white, purple or pink flowers in mid-spring.

This tropical climbing vine is a relative of morning glory and has large, fragrant white flowers that bloom as the sun sets. In hot climates, this vine is considered perennial and can be invasive, so plant it in a container to limit its size.

With hundreds of varieties of this hardy shrub, there’s one that fits any garden no matter how big or small. Many hydrangeas bloom white, then fade to a lovely pale green or dusty pink as they age. They make impressive accents or hedges, and their long bloom time means you can enjoy their flowers until a hard frost.

This old-fashioned favorite is essential in any shady garden. Their ethereal flowers drape from delicate foliage, making them an enchanting perennial to include in your garden.

This handsome ground cover has low-growing wooly, silver leaves. In early summer, it’s covered in a mass of beautiful white flowers.

One of the last perennials in your garden to bloom, this shrubby plant has shiny leaves and masses of daisy-like flowers in mid- to late autumn. It’s also a plant that deer tend to ignore.

This old-fashioned shrub has a delightful citrus fragrance when it blooms in late spring. It’s best as a border or privacy hedge, but it also makes a lovely cut flower.

Grown for its silvery, lacy foliage, artemisia is an excellent backdrop to showier plants. They’re hardy plants that don’t mind hot, sunny, dry locations once established.

Peonies are the queens of the springtime garden with statuesque flowers and intense fragrance. There are many different colors, so read the description to choose a white variety, and don’t plant too deep (a common reason peonies don’t bloom well).

No garden is complete without a rose bush, and newer varieties are less fussy than you might think. Give them plenty of sun to ensure blooms. Climbing types are especially appealing in a moon garden, rambling over a trellis.