SUSIE’S GARDEN
Fill your garden with long-lasting plants that will reward you with flowers all through summer and well into autumn
Bees and butterflies are busy in these early autumn days feeding up on nectar while plants are still flowering. Some of their favourites are the heleniums, gorgeous daisies in dazzlingly hot colours of orange, yellow and mahogany red. Velvety frilled petals are arranged around a central raised cone, a deep brown button that sits like a knitted hat on top. They make excellent cut flowers and are tough, low maintenance plants.
My heleniums are planted throughout the border, some near the front, others further back but where I can still see their strong colours. They have been flowering since late July and will carry on doing d so right through until u the end of September. S This makes them such good value plants: long lasting, good for insects, colourful and suitable for cutting.
There are lots of different varieties of helenium. Although they are native to North America – prairie plants that grow in huge drifts -– it is particularly in the Netherlands and Germany that they have been bred into new varieties for different colours and long flowering times. So they have names like ‘Moerheim Beauty’, ‘Goldrausch’ (which means gold rush) while one of the richest reds of all is ‘Indianersommer’.
They vary in height from the compact ‘Short and Sassy’ up to varieties that are five feet tall. If you want, you can give them the Chelsea chop, cutting them back by a third in the second half of May which can make them flower later, even into October. Easy to grow, heleniums are my top plants for sizzling, vibrant, late season colour.