What to plant in your garden right now for later summer colour
What to plant in your garden right now for later summer colour
Plus: we take a look at a very special dahlia, this month's What Not To Do in Your Garden, and another Zoom meet-up
It’s April, and I know it might seem a bit early to be thinking ahead to July borders, but now is exactly the right time to be planning them
Whether relaxed or natural or tidily manicured, your garden will make you feel happy every time you see it, and remind you just how worthwhile it was to have spent all those rainy weekends indoors, planning and poring over catalogues. The picture has been painted, it’s on display, and everything is just right.
That’s when the Main Monochrome Moment strikes.
But first of all:
What’s in store in The Gardening Mind this week?
I’ve been really looking forward to this week’s post:
I’ve got some simple planting combinations for you which will rescue your garden just at that moment when it starts to fade.
Also, we take a look at a very special dahlia.
My April Garden To Do list.
As the rain continues and the slugs carry on partying, I’m shifting quite a lot of items to my What Not To Do list.
There’s also a Small Garden Design Zoom date - for paid subscribers, along with some one-to-one mentoring sessions.
Also for paid subscribers is our Real-Life Meet-Up:
Our first garden meet-up of the year is taking place at the wonderful walled gardens at Water Lane in Kent. Water Lane is around a 20 minutes’ drive from the wonderful gardens of Great Dixter and Sissinghurst, for anyone thinking of making a weekend of it. We’ll be there for a couple of hours, talking through the design plans for the garden, pottering around the vegetable beds, inspecting the cutting flower patches, and wandering around some of the historic glasshouses.
There’s no fee for the meet-up, as this is a thank you to you for your on-going support. Please could you let me know if you’re thinking of coming the poll later in this post? Details of the date and time are also at the end of this post.
It may seem early to be thinking about late summer
At this very moment the tulips are having their heyday and the first perennials are just coming into leaf, and it’s hard to imagine May, let alone the later summer, but if you’ve ever had that Main Monochrome Moment in July, you’ll know exactly what I mean.
What’s the Main Monochrome Moment?
In May, your garden will probably look beautiful: everything you planted either in autumn or March will be flowering away, and your garden will now coast nicely along until the end of June. The roses will have been flowering their socks off since mid-May, and their planting partners such as hardy geraniums and salvias, will for weeks have been pumping out that much-needed colour.
It looks wonderful - perfect, in fact. Whether relaxed or natural or tidily manicured, your garden will make you feel happy every time you see it, and remind you just how worthwhile it was to have spent all those rainy weekends indoors, planning and poring over catalogues. The picture has been painted, it’s on display, and everything is just right.
And this is precisely when the Main Monochrome Moment strikes
Suddenly, all the colour disappears. The roses need a break in order to gather their reserves and prepare for a second flush of flowers; the geraniums are getting straggly and need a chop-back in order to encourage another blooming. There’s a lot of green everywhere, but somehow, something - some colour, all colour - goes missing, and it’ll stay missing for another month or so.
This moment catches me out every year in my own garden. I’m usually so busily concentrating on the general excitement of the first flowers after another long grey winter that I give all my attention and all the space over to these May/June favourites. And, predictably, every year, the garden then drains of all colour apart from green for a few weeks whilst it catches up with itself.
But you can avoid this, and that’s why I want to tell you about it now, rather than waiting till it’s actually happening in July, when it’s too late to do anything about it by then.
When this colour-vanish happened yet again last July, I made a solemn vow to myself that I would no longer be caught out in future, and I decided to do what I do in clients’ gardens, which is to plan for colour throughout the summer. So easy to say, so easy to ignore in one’s own garden. There are to be no more monochrome moments in this garden: instead, it’s going to be packed with flower colour right through those normally desperate months of July and August.
So today, I’m sharing my summer-saving plants with you, along with a short film which shows other combinations for you to try at home
In this late summer planting combination, there’s a star of the show, a beauty of a plant which inspires the whole scheme. It’s a plant which goes on and on on, providing the prettiest and gentlest of flower colour from July right though to October - I can’t do without it.
The magical, floaty effect it creates is definitely not what you’d expect of a