Grass act! How to add cool colour
BRING texture, colour and movement to your garden at this time of year with ornamental grasses.
Add splashes of bright flowers and you can keep things looking cool and classy this autumn.
Cover the ground with Stipa tenuissima, known as Mexican feathergrass, planting it in bold drifts of three or more so leaves spill outward like a foamy sea.
Then enjoy the power of perennials like Aster Monch, the best blue Michaelmas daisy, with long-lasting flowers that appear as the days start to shorten. They are a magnet to pollinating insects and seed heads provide a feast for birds.
Sneezeworts, or helenium, are another mainstay of late-summer and autumn borders where their bright blooms provide bees with a valuable late source of pollen and nectar. They have a dark raised velvety knob in the centre surrounded by a ring of plain brassy yellow, bright scarlet or rich crimson petals.
They can inject vivid colour into dreary and lifeless planting schemes.
Heleniums also associate well with
CLASSICS: Aster Monch and sneezewort
late-flowering rudbeckias, helianthus, heliopsis and goldenrod and are great in trendy prairie planting schemes.
These schemes rely on mass plantings of ornamental grasses with splashes of vibrant herbaceous perennials running randomly.
Purple coneflower, or echinacea, with its large daisy-like fragrant flower heads, stands out in a border. Bright pink varieties blend well with blooms in soft yellow and apricot shades and with bronze foliage. It attracts comma and small tortoiseshell butterflies too.
A successful partnership is Echinacea Robert Bloom and Sedum Herbstfreude. It will also perform well in a big pot so make it a running theme to link the patio with your flowerbeds.
Tall perennials with blooms on spikes and spires also look good in prairie-style planting, so dot red hot pokers, crocosmia and deep blue salvias throughout.