Predict a riot of colour Dazzlers that turn up heat
FILL your garden with nonstop flowers for a blaze of colour through to the frosts.
Turn up the heat and introduce varieties with strong shades that will linger and pulsate with energy to give the p place a fiesta atmosphere.
T The easiest recipe for an instant late show is to buy plants already in bloo bloom, especially dazzling daisy blo blooms i n hot orange, deep m mahogany and brilliant yellows.
The blanketflower, Gaillardia D Dazzler, is a winner, seducing with m mahogany-red flowers tipped with ye yellow. It works well with silvery lea leaved Artemisia Powis Castle. Su Sunflower Monarch is a stately back back-of-the-border beauty with bright yello yellow, mushroom- like heads that h happily deceive you into thinking the sun is shining when it is not.
Heleniums are awash with glorious daisy blooms until November. They are tall, clump-forming perennials that can be used to create bold drifts of yellow, bronze, orange and red in a sunny border. They look stunning with ornamental grasses, sedums, rudbeckias and asters.
Magnets
Helenium flowers are also good for cutting and attract bees.
Rudbeckia have black-eyed, daisy blooms that last weeks and look amazing in a block or interspersed with white Japanese anemones and butterfly magnets, Michaelmas daisies.
Aster x frikartii Monch will also stretch the season in your beds. Its lavender-blue blooms with a yellow disc look pleasing with the silvery foliage of dusty miller or artemisia as well as chrysanthemums and dahlias with yellow, pink and crimson flowers.
For a shapely sh contrast to daisy blooms, try crocosmia, with its clumps of strap-shaped strap leaves alongside spiky sprays of trumpet flowers in red, r orange and yellow. Lucifer Lu is a popular variety.
Make use of the towering torches to of red hot pokers too to – they can stoke up dying d embers in late borders, especially es Kniphofia Atlanta. Yellow Ye flowers with glowing red tips wow alongside flat flower flowe heads of Achillea Coronation Coro Gold and daylilies.
BRIGHT IDEA: Rudbeckia