Oh. I just realized...maybe my soil is too dense. Maybe I need to add some sand to the soil. Gophers had decimated the bed this spring, and the "landscapers" who installed my sprinkler system had really left some untidy areas in the bed. So I bought cheap dirt in bags from Lowes, and filled the holes, and packed the dirt in there with gopher repellant. It's a raised bed, but maybe the soil was just to dense for the flowers to survive wet feet. Any suggestions would be appreciated! Incidentally - the gopher repellant was successful for about 3 months. Castor-bean based, I believe. Need to deal with them again.

Without knowing what your soil really is like, how much rainfall you get, how much irrigation water you provide weekly, etc., all of us would just be guessing. what might survive in those conditions. I assume that in a normal summer (2017 really hasn't been a normal summer as it generally has had milder temperatures and much more rain than usual in most areas), you'd have to irrigate heavily to keep the azaleas happily.

Have the azaleas been there a couple of years or are they brand new? Because if they are new, I think I'd wait a year or two and see how they do before I did more extensive planting there. Azaleas and roses both need very well-drained soil long-term, so I hope the soil there drains well. Adding sand is not necessarily the answer. Adding organic matter could be the answer.

One way to start would be to do the soil jar test I'm going to link below to gain a better understanding of the composition of your soil and its texture. Once you know more about what your soil is composed of, we probably would be better able to suggest plants that would thrive in that sort of soil with fairly heavy irrigation.

Here's the soil jar test for texture:

Soil Jar Test for Texture, Soil Composition