Long-lasting flowers for summer gardens
You need to choose carefully if you want longer-lasting blooms in your garden.
Award-winning garden designer and BBC Gardeners’ World presenter Nick Bailey, author of 365 Days Of Colour In Your Garden, offers his top picks for plants which will flower through summer and beyond...
ANISODONTEA ‘EL RAYO’
This South African plant from the Lavatera family is incredibly fastgrowing and floriferous, says Nick.
“It will go from 1ft to 6ft in a year in a south-facing position, as the cup-shaped mid-pink flowers with a burgundy blotch at the base. The extraordinary thing about it is that it never stops flowering for 365 days of the year.”
It can grow to 2m so is ideally placed at the back of a border, or you could plant a number of them in a row to create a divide, used as a design tool to buffer boundaries.
“It’s one of those live-fast die-young plants. It will grow from 0-2m for about four years and then it just drops dead. It basically flowers itself to death. It’s not invasive but is likely to self-seed, so new plants should replace the old ones,” Nick explains.
ROSA ‘BENGAL CRIMSON’
“This is extraordinary in that it flowers 365 days a year, which makes it unique. It’s very close to the wild rose species, which means less pest and disease problems. I’ve never known it to have pest and disease problems,” says Nick. “The flower tone changes in winter, when it becomes a red-pink rather than crimson.
“It wants a rich soil, a sunny spot, and you don’t need to prune it and it’s nearly thorn-less. It will grow to around
3m if unpruned, but you can train it flatter on a wall.
“You can also grow it in a pot, but it will need richer feed specifically for roses in a container.”
NEMESIA ‘CONFETTI’
“If you put these in a warm spot in winter, under cover or next to the walls of your house, they won’t stop flowering long after summer has gone,” says Nick.
“This South African plant has a slightly musky scent and little bits of dead material occasionally need to be removed from it, but otherwise it’s a great plant to have in a container or series of containers to give a foamy form, and it will spill over the edge of a container and flower endlessly.”
GERANIUM WALLICHIANUM ‘LILAC ICE’
“Everybody knows Geranium ‘Rozanne’, the almost forever-flowering purple geranium. It comes from a species called wallichianum and at the same time, a number of other plants were developed which aren’t as wellknown but do exactly the same as ‘Rozanne’. These include ‘Lilac Ice’, an off-white with lilac and pink. It is just as vigorous as Rozanne and you’ll get about eight months’ flowering from it.”
HYDRANGEA PANICULATA ‘WIM’S RED’
“This shrub goes through
lime notes, pinks and ultimately a fairly rich red. It flowers for around six months, from late June to November, but changes through the season, adding that extra dynamic,” says Nick”. “Being a paniculata, it has spikeformed rather than pom-pomformed flowers, so I would complement that with something relatively upright, which replicates its form such as Veronicastrum ‘Fascination’ which has spiked lavender blue flowers.”