Sunday Mirror (Northern Ireland)
Blooming marvels
Autumn is the perfect time to plant perennials to add colour to your garden
soft blue and white combo of ‘Bluebird’.
Its fresh green foliage emerges in spring and flowers blossom shortly thereafter. Grow it in fertile, moist but well-drained soil in sun or dappled shade.
Alchemilla mollis has pretty apple-green kidney-shaped scalloped leaves and sprays of small yellow flowers. It’s superb for really dry areas – water in until it gets established, then it will find its own way in life.
What I also love about this plant is that you can cut back all the dead foliage and then get brand new leaves and some flowers all over again in late summer. Low to the ground, it edges paths and borders beautifully and when it rains, pearlescent drops of water perch on the leaves.
Salvias are long flowering, and one of the easiest is S. nemorosa ‘Caradonna’ which will produce endless spikes of dreamy blue flowers in summer. It’s very easy to grow in a sunny spot with well-drained soil. Keep deadheading it to get the maximum out of this plant.
There are tonnes of other salvias and many of them come with pretty bicoloured flowers. However, many of these are tender so if you want to keep things simple, choose hardy varieties – another excellent one is ‘Mainacht’.
Hardy geraniums are a big family with many different growth habits – sprawling, scrambling, ground cover, neat or bushy varieties – and a good range of petal colours from white to all shades of pink and blue.
‘Rozanne’ is one of the most popular these days and is still flowering her socks off in my garden. Growing to over a foot tall, it’s great for injecting volume into the borders.
For early flowers next year get planting some hellebores and they won’t let you down. Helleborus niger, the Christmas rose, is usually the first of its type to come into bloom.
Its common moniker is confusing as it is neither a member of the rose family and is rarely in bloom at Christmas time, though you can get forced varieties to perform early. Unlike most hellebores, which have shy, nodding flowers that hide their beauty, this species tends to hold its beautiful white, bowl-shaped flowers more upright.
Plant near the house where you will be able to admire them from indoors without having to venture out in the bad weather of late winter/early spring.