August is my favourite month for enjoying my garden in the evening. In summer, warm sunshine beats down on buildings and surrounding paving and gets absorbed over the summer months and by August the heat is stored and gets released back from the porous surfaces, as the evening cools down. This background heat is radiated back and allows the air to stay warm into the late evening. This combined with the reduction in light levels as we head into autumn allows us to see our garden spaces as outdoor rooms and offers a different view. If you remember during covid, the RHS held the Chelsea Flower Show in September and by the evening all the gardens needed lighting to be seen by the visitors. It totally transformed the event, and I’ve often wished they would repeat this event to demonstrate how plant colours and scents are totally different. Plants flowering in August and September have adapted to attract pollinators, and this can be exploited to give you a fantastic surge of beauty at this time of year.
The stars of the show have mainly tube-shaped flowers such as salvia, verbena, and nicotiana. Or they emit evening fragrance to entice night flying insects to visit them, such as acidanthera, chocolate cosmos, petunias and late Dutch honeysuckle (lonicera serotina).
The best way to enjoy this late bounty is to surround your seating areas with these plants and let the joyous colours and their intoxicating perfume pervade the air around you. Nicotiana are the masters of this, my favourite varieties are sylvestris and Tinkerbell. Sylvestris are pure white and statuesque with clusters of long white tube flowers that are exquisitely scented and show up so well in an evening garden. Grown easily from seed in April, by August and September they are over a metre high and planted in a mixed border are totally awesome. Tinkerbell is a shorter nicotiana hybrid in mixed tones of pink, great in containers or at the front of the border.
For drama I also recommend the later flowering salvias such as Love and Wishes, Amistad, or the second flush of an already flowered and cut back variety called Caradonna. The first two are tender perennials that are easily propagated from cuttings, whereas Caradonna is a hardy variety that will happily stay out all yeas as long, as it has good drainage. All are smothered in flowers right into the late autumn.
Late Dutch honeysuckle is a joy to grow for burgundy and yellow flowers with gorgeous scent through to September in a sunny or semi shaded position. Dead heading produces flowers right through till the end of September and then the final flowering produces translucent red berries for birds and small mammals in the autumn.
PLANT OF THE MONTH
Verbena bonariensis. This useful plant is great in any sunny aspect and because it carries its lilac-coloured flowers on long stems from summer right through the autumn, it is an ideal filler in borders and tall containers. It’s also a great companion plant for an annual climber called Black Eyed Susie with lovely tangerine flowers which clambers up the stems and compliments the cooler lilac colour of the verbena.
Stillingfleet Gardens (Image: Supplied) GARDEN OF THE MONTH
Stillingfleet Lodge Gardens
This organically managed garden is a haven for wildlife and a real inspiring space to show the best way to work in harmony with nature. The owners have developed the garden over 40 years, surrounding their family farmhouse. Open only from April to September, so August is the ideal month to visit. stillingfleetlodgenurseries.co.uk
What can you recommend I plant this autumn to get an early show next year for a spring wedding?
This sounds exciting. My passion is planting containers for more than one season and I think I have a good recipe to make sure you have something to have as background for wedding photos and dressing the wedding venue. My first recommendation is to plant the biggest pots you can afford or move. Start by adding a layer of drainage and a good depth of compost. Then my plant list is as follows…. Narcissus Thalia, Toto and Mount Hood, tulips Maureen, White Prince and Greenland, muscari alba, anemone blanda (soaked overnight before planting), to plant in layers, the largest bulbs planted the deepest and build up in layers as you add the compost. For the top a plant cornus midwinter fire in the centre, with lovely golden stems and lime green emerging leaves and surround the remaining surface with viola sorbet hybrids and finish with trailing variegated ivies. This mix will flower right through the early spring through till May so ideal for a spring wedding display.
I want to make compost this coming season but I’m worried about attracting rats. Please can you advise what is the best way to avoid getting furry tenants in my compost heap?
This is asked a lot by new gardeners and to be honest it all depends on the type of materials you add to the heap. The golden rule is layering in six-inch layers of ‘green’ and ‘brown’ materials to produce an aerated heap. Brown materials are shredded up cardboard, twigs from pruning, bark chips, and occasionally a layer of spent compost from old planters. Green layers can be grass cuttings, annual weeds, vegetable peelings and green hedge clippings. A really good tip to make the clippings break down quicker is to throw them on your lawn and run over them a couple of times with your lawnmower with the box on to shred down larger stems etc. Things you must not add are cooked food scraps, any meat or fish waste or any citrus skins, which will attract vermin. The container can have a chicken wire floor to stop burrowing up into the heap from underneath and edge the heap with slates to keep out foraging mammals.
