Features
Extending Summer's Bounty
Oh, feel the heat! A breeze shakes the grass as a bee bumbles overhead. You shield your eyes from the bright sunshine to see swallows glide past. Grasshoppers sing as you sip a cool drink. Lying back into the cool green grass, lulling into a hazy half sleep… might light the barbecue later. Not every Irish summer day is so perfect, but there are a few. Often it is the end of summer and early autumn that brings the best weather for lazy days.
Harvest Season
We all want the summer to last just a little bit longer. Time however, marches on. The evenings get shorter and night lingers longer. After Lughnasa has passed, we have harvest to look forward to; apples hang from trees, blackberries fill the hedgerows and the tomatoes in the greenhouse are, at last, the deep red we expected. In the flower borders there is much to admire. Late summer and early autumn can be high season. High flowering Helianthus seek the sun, fleshy sedums attract the butterflies close to the earth, while in between, Asters and Rudbeckia keep flowering until the days are much shorter and frost replaces early morning dew on the grass.
Helianthus ‘Miss Mellish’ surely does get around. She will quickly outgrow her allotted space, take over the flower border and dominate. But I still would not want to be without her come late summer. Towering stems that grow as you watch throughout the summer reach their zenith with a celebration of warm yellow daisies. Even in a windy garden the stems are strong and don’t require much support.
A relative of the sunflower, it has similar happy but more numerous flowers that are a good deal smaller. Golden yellow ray florets, which look like petals, surround the dark centres. It belongs to the daisy family, flowering brilliantly at the end of summer and continuing into autumn.
Long Lasting Rudbeckia
Rudbeckia or cone flowers as they are often called are invaluable for the late season finale. Tallest of all is Rudbeckia ‘Herbstsonne’, with wiry stems reaching to two metres. A little staking in the form of a metal herbaceous plant support is required, otherwise the stems flop after an Irish summer shower or robust gust of wind. Each stem reaches for the sky, holding aloft a green conical flower surrounded by slack yellow petals hanging from the centre. Loved by bees and butterflies, it attracts more than admiration. A smaller darker relative is Rudbeckia fulgida var. sulliavantii ‘Goldsturm’. On much shorter growth, the yellow petals surround a dark brown central cone, each flower possessing a rich contrast of autumnal colour. Rudbeckias are easy to grow in any reasonable garden soil.
A close relative of Rudbeckia is Echinacea. If you don’t grow it in your garden, you might know it as the drops or tablets you get from health food stores to improve your immune system. In addition to its medical properties, the rich pink daisies will boost your spirits each day that you see them.
They will flower through the holiday month of August and will still be joyful long after children have returned to school. Made like Rudbeckia, they differ little in appearance except for colour. The central cones are deep pink or purple, sometimes with a delicate ring of yellow as the central florets open, while the ray florets are shades of pink or crimson. There is also a white variety called ‘R. White Swan’.
Autumn Colour
Sedum ‘Herbstfreuede’ is a real autumn joy. Tiny pink star shaped flowers are packed densely together in a big flat head, looking like a colourful pink broccoli. Beneath the flowers are icy grey fleshy leaves, which start to appear in early spring from tiny rossettes at the base.
By August the stems are 40cm high and the flowers on top are a feast for butterflies and bees looking for sweet nectar. Dark leaved varieties like S. ‘Matrona’ where the foliage is dark purple and the flowers dusky, are very desirable for the garden.
Understated and sultry when mingling with wispy grasses such as Stipa tenuissima, or brazen with Echinacea, they add to the enjoyment of the garden in late summer. Be brave and ruthless with your Sedums in early summer and give them the Chelsea chop. This involves getting your secateurs out in the last week of May, while the Chelsea flower show is on, and cutting back all the stems by half. This results in a bushier plant with more flowers.
If left uncut, the flower stems often flop outward leaving a bare centre and an untidy plant in August. We tried it at home, and it works. Each year the sedums get their annual attack.
A Splash Of Yellow
Anthemis ‘Susannah Mitchell’ must be one of the longest flowering perennials we grow in our garden. From May until October the pale yellow daisies with darker yellow eyes shine through the dullest and sunniest days of Irish summer and autumn.
Beneath their floriferous splendour is a spreading mound of soft feathery silver green foliage. It is the result of hybridizing two good garden species, Anthemis tinctoria and A. punctata subsp. cupanianna. The former has yellow flowers on green leaved upright stems about 1m high while the second parent has prostrate growth of silver leaves and white daisies.
The hybrid inherits the best of each parent and is a plant of great beauty. It requires little attention other than a chopping back in winter to tidy up the tired stems.
Choosing Cultivars
Asters are old fashioned garden plants, often associated with cottage style gardens. There is little to rival a group of healthy flowering asters in September, but therein lies a problem for many gardeners. Many asters are particularly prone to powdery mildew.
Non-organic gardeners might be tempted to employ a spraying programme through the summer months, but really they only delay the inevitable. If an aster is prone to powdery mildew it will succumb no matter how much you spray.
Not all asters get the disease – mainly cultivars of the species A. novii-belgii are susceptible. Some varieties are supposed to have some resistance, so choose them carefully. One hybrid species that does not suffer from the affliction is Aster x frikartii.
The cultivar ‘Monch’ is best known and represents all that is good about the species. From mid-summer till late autumn, blue ray florets surround a golden disc to create a flower of infinite cheerfulness. They grow to about 60cm high and require no staking and no spraying.
Good Husbandry
Careful choice of cultivar combined with appropriate positioning and good cultivation is the most effective way of avoiding disease problems such as powdery mildew in the ornamental garden.
Ensuring that the soil does not dry out at the roots of the plant helps reduce incidence of powdery mildew, so mulch each autumn or spring with well rotted manure, garden compost or bulk organic matter. Soils with high organic matter content hold more moisture.
The practice of thinning herbaceous plants such as Asters and other species that produce dense growth of stems from the base, is not often carried out by gardeners, but it has some good advantages. Thinning of such herbaceous plants involves removing one third of the growth when the plant is one-third its ultimate height, which is usually in about May. Pinch or cut way the weakest third of the stem. This results in the remaining stems growing stronger and providing a better floral display later. The increased air circulation in the clump helps reduce fungal problems like powdery mildew.
Late summer and autumn flowering perennials can make the summer feel longer. In September the days are often warm and the evenings are still long enough to enjoy the garden after a days work. Herbaceous perennials last from year to year, growing in size and can soon be propagated to provide even more flowers for the garden. They are mostly hardy, which means their production requires no heat inputs and can even be produced outside without the need for polytunnels or glasshouses. So if your garden has finished its summer before the kids are back to school, consider investing in some good late perennials and enjoy a colourful autumn.
A Soil Association report in the UK finds that Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) offers many benefits to members,
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