The chart below shows the blooming times of various plants in my garden from last year. A chart like this is useful, because it helps gardeners to create plant combinations based on blooming times.
What stands out to me from the chart is the really long bloom time of nepeta, also known as catmint. This makes catmint a great companion plant. Plus it’s very attractive to bees and butterflies! Another pollinator magnet, which will extend bloom time in your garden right through October, is calamintha (not shown in the chart below), which starts blooming here around August 1, a few weeks after the catmints start fading in July. I think I have ten calamintha plants throughout my garden, eight of them added just last year.
If you want to fill in that short bloomless gap between nepeta and calamintha, you can’t go wrong with agastache, which is also highly attractive to pollinators and blooms over a very long period starting in July. All three plants — nepeta, calamintha, and agastache — together provide a continuous season long of bloom as well as important food for pollinators.
Unfortunately, most of my July and August blooming plants are excluded from the chart as I started to neglect my record keeping during the dog days of summer. I might try to update the chart this year.