Prepare for the season ahead
Val shares the secrets of her autumn border – which starts to take shape in September
My autumn border, positioned on the south-western edge of my garden, catches warm afternoon sun and is backlit by winter sunsets. Low light picks up detail so the thistledown on the fading asters almost glistens and beaded grasses form a veil. Most of the plants are tall and late, but the tapestry of green buds and foliage looks handsome all through summer. Stars of the show are taller grasses whose silhouettes sway in the slightest breeze. They include New Zealand toe toe grass (Cortaderia richardii), which dwarfs my summerhouse when it flowers in July. I also use a plummy miscanthus ‘Ferne Osten’, which picks up the foliage of Cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’, the only shrub in this border. It has gossamer, almost-frothy flowers and striking purple-red foliage that frames cream and green-striped Miscanthus sinensis ‘Cosmpolitan’. Tall sanguisorbas, with maroon bobbly heads, provide an upright, airy presence, breaking up the moundforming daisies. My favourites include ‘Cangshan Cranberry’ and ‘Martin’s Mulberry’. Bold crocosmia foliage also thrusts upwards and bright red ‘Lucifer’ is one of my few July-flowering plants, along with red-centred, dark-stemmed heliopsis ‘Summer Nights’. Tall, pale yellow daisies form large clumps. Helianthus ‘Lemon Queen’, planted with dark-stemmed wine-red eupatoriums, joins with the larger daisies of ‘Sheila’s Sunshine’. My tallest aster, a black-stemmed one with mid-blue flowers and dark foliage, is Symphyotrichum laeve ‘Calliope’. I grow bushy ‘Little Carlow’ and curtseying ‘Vasterival’ (also sold as ‘Les Moutiers’). Autumn-flowering monkshoods provide even stronger blues. The thick, downy stems of Aconitum carmichaelii ‘Arendsii’ are clothed in handsome green foliage and topped by spires of deep-blue hooded flowers. I also use softer-blue ‘Spätlese’, a branching, long-flowering aconitum that often has a final flourish in September too. Blue appears more vibrant with orange and I always look forward to the almost conical, soft-orange Kniphofia rooperi flowers. Leave red-hot poker foliage intact to protect the crowns in winter, then neaten in late spring. In February the whole area is cut down and weeded. By March and April new growth appears, which is the best time to move or divide plants – if you want more, or the middle of the clump looks dead. Plant new additions in threes because an autumn border relies on large clumps mingling together.
The tapestry of green buds and foliage looks handsome all summer