Autumn Flowers: How to Keep the Garden Looking Fresh
[ad_1]
For forward-thinking gardeners, stretching out the flowering season for as long as possible is a no-brainer to create borders that look good almost entirely year-round. But it takes careful planning, editing, and maintenance. And in autumn, arguably, the balance is most finely calibrated. As summer ends, a garden that remains vibrant until the first frost can be mesmerizingly beautiful, making the most of autumn’s soft, hazy light. Follow these eight seasonal pointers to keep your borders singing for as long as possible.
1. Keep deadheading.
Above: Cut back early flowering salvias hard in July after their first flowering and they will return with an autumn flush. But continually deadheading perennials down to a pair of leaves will also keep the flower spikes growing until the first frosts. Photograph by Claire Takacs.
2. Lean in to jewel colors.
Above: The season’s heavy hitters, including dahlias and red hot pokers, can often appear too garish to those with a preference for more subdued schemes. But choose just one or two hues to create a tonal effect and these flowers take on a more elegant character. Here, in the Blue Diamond Forge garden at the Chelsea Flower Show in 2021, Kniphofia ‘Poco Red’ stars in a tonal scene with chocolate cosmos, airy Panicum ‘Rehbraun’ and echinacea. Photograph by Britt Willoughby Dyer.
Above: Michaelmas daisies bring lush mounds of intense color to borders, just as other perennials start to lose some vigor. Their range of hues, from deep purple to all shades of pink, look wonderful planted en masse or mixed with grasses, and their variety of forms allows them to be planted throughout a border. As the name suggests ‘Purple Dome’ forms neat mounds to around 5ocm with intense purple flowers for the front of a border; the ever-popular ‘Little Carlow’, not all that little at 1.2m, has upright stems topped with the prettiest lilac daisies, while ‘Violetta’ has intense magenta flowers and produces upright stems to 1.5m. These late flowering perennials also provide a valuable source of nectar through the autumn months. Photograph by Britt Willoughy Dyer.
4. Maximise structure.
Above: Add interesting structural plants that can hold interest when there are fewer plants flowering. Here, Melianthus major takes center stage against a warm wall at Le Jardin Plume in Normandy, France. With its stunning toothed, glaucous leaves, this architectural plant can be a dazzling addition to borders too, but it needs a sheltered spot in free draining soil. Photograph by Claire Takacs.
