Is your garden in need of an August boost?
Late summer garden favourites to bring colour back into the borders
Hello and a very big welcome
Yes, welcome to this edition of The Gardening Mind. With many new members, I thought it would be nice to introduce ourselves to each other, so do please pop a note in here - if you feel like doing so, of course. It really is a gentle, kind space and we’re always delighted to meet and learn about new members.
You’ll find that this Gardening Mind newsletter is actually more of a magazine, with different sections that you can amble through at your leisure. You can find all these sections in the bar that heads the main Home Page: have a scroll through and along that, as more sections will reveal themselves as you move along. Also, do always ask if you can’t find something or if you’re not sure how to navigate. For example, there’s a brilliant Notes section which I use to swap ideas, and which all readers can use - you don’t need to have your own Substack page to use it, and so it’s super-handy for things like sharing plant photos and ideas. Have a go!
Does your garden suffer from that Main Monochrome Moment?
In the garden, May and June are eruptions of flowery fabulousness, and some of these midsummer plants make a supreme effort, managing to cling on and hang on in there until the beginning of July. But after that, there’s often a little bit of a disappointment. There’s a kind of lull from the second week in July, where there’s an awful lot of green going on in the flowerbeds, but not much else to shout about.
I try to remind myself that this ‘Main Monochrome Moment’ is the time when the plants are all in a bit of recovery, either thinking about blooming once more, if indeed that is their way, or perhaps they still have yet to flower, and are finally making their way out into the open, now that there’s a bit of breathing space for them. Now, right now, is that moment. August is definitely here, and after a bit of a pause in colour excitement, the tones and the shades, the colours that make a garden what it is, are now deciding to appear.
Pottering through the garden, and sometimes pottering-squelching due to the UK’s summer deluges and downpours, I’ve put together my best August-flowerers for you. I know everyone finds a plant list really useful, and the glorious fact is that because the ground isn’t its usual summer hard-as-rock self, it means we can still get plants into the ground, which is totally brilliant. (For beginners, I’ll be talking about how I actually plant plants in the new How To Garden course in September).
And it’s very good news in the garden:
At the words ‘late summer plantings’, your mind might leap to an image of a blazing jolliness of reds, oranges and yellows, and we will indeed be looking at these ‘hot’ colours in a couple of weeks’ time. But today we’re still soaking up the meditative calming effect of the pastels, with a hint of orange and coral just easing us into the September warmth and October fieriness. There’s at least one member of The Gardening Mind whom I know isn’t the biggest fan of pastels - if you too are more minded towards stronger colours, I’m hoping that the mix here gives you something to choose from.
Later on in this post we’ll come back to these plants pictured here, together with the full plant list and stockists and sources.
But let’s pause here for just a moment. In my garden, there’s one particular spot that’s having a real moment of its own, and I’m going to take you to look at it for a second or two.
A few years ago, I decided to dedicate an area of my garden to butterflies. Whilst the whole garden is created with the intention of bringing as many pollinators in as possible, I felt that there needed to be an area that was untidier, less managed than the rest of the garden1. But the main reason that I needed this separate area was that I wanted to grow buddlejas.
People hate buddlejas, with their bad, no, TERRIBLE reputation as pioneers along railway lines and their ability to grow out of the most unlikely bits of falling-down buildings. These pale lilac varieties feel wild, raggedy, and in death they are ugly, with their grey-blue panicles becoming a solid brown lump. It was partly due to this unimpressive reputation that I wanted to try to champion them, in the knowledge that at least the butterflies and the bees would thank me. Choosing a range of colours and shapes that looked nice in the catalogues - yes, my research was really as simple as that - I popped them in, watered them once and then abandoned them to Fate.
The verdict is, my friends, that the buddleja is a BRILLIANT August plant. Excellent. The colour range is really pleasing, with something for everyone, whilst the plant itself is as tough as old boots, not minding at all as I hack it back in autumn, then hack it back a little bit more in early spring. There’s no real art to this what I would loosely term ‘pruning’, and I reckon it honestly thanks me for it by its show of flowers right about now. It is certainly true that the flowers don’t die too beautifully, but that’s a pretty big ask of anything, I reckon, apart from ornamental grasses. So I recommend that you get right in to the buddleja plant and snip off the panicles, and the plant will go on flowering for ages.
Plant a buddleja in your garden and the butterflies will also be saying a great big thank you. Pictured here are the varieties that I have in my garden, and as I drool over the varieties available at The Buddleja National Collection, I’m wondering whether I should bite the bullet and introduce some new ones to the rear of my main garden borders:
Buddleja davidii ‘White Profusion’
Buddleja davidii ‘Pink Delight’
Buddleja davidii ‘Black Knight’
Buddlja cordata subsp tomentella
Fascinating Fact: Buddleja, or Buddleia2 was named after the Reverend Adam Buddle (1662–1715), a botanist and rector in Essex, England.
Anyone tempted to plant one?
I may still not have tempted you over to the buddleja side. I know that.
I have a feeling, however, that you may very well be tempted by some, or even ALL of the August-flowering perennials, shrubs and climbers whose photos appeared earlier. Again, every one of these plants shown is an easy plant. I absolutely have a mission to recommend to you only those plants which I grow or have grown. And because it’s me, these plants also have to be easy to look after. Nothing too high-maintenance on my watch.