Easy ways to pep up your plot
Easy ideas to revitalise gardens that have been hit by the heat
It’s that time in the summer when the garden can all of a sudden seem short of colour, with a lot of early summerflowering plants having said a fond farewell for another year, and the first flush of roses gone.
So, some simple tasks that will inject the garden with more colour and interest will help bridge the ‘colour gap’ and keep the garden vibrant and beautiful for the rest of the summer ahead.
These quick summer projects will give your plot an instant lift and provide lots of extra colour, meaning that the pressure isn’t on a small handful of plants to provide all the highlights and points of interest in the garden.
1 PAINT YOUR POTS
Painting terracotta pots in bright colours can make a big difference to the look of your patio and immediately smarten it up. Try it on containers that don’t have plants overhanging the outside. Clean up the outside of the pot with a stiff brush and soapy water, let it dry then paint with masonry paint or emulsion, which won’t last as long (a year or so) but gives you a wider choice of colours. Get creative and try stripes and different colour combos on the same pot. Look out for ‘tester’ pots of emulsion in DIY shops so you can try a wide range of colours to see which suits you and your garden best.
2 REVIVE FURNITURE
Don’t let wooden items in your garden let the side down. Give them a lick of coloured wood stain or paint to make the garden look cleaner and sharper. Benches and raised beds can be given a new lease of life by sanding them down and applying three coats of a wood stain, or paint such as Cuprinol Garden Shades. In dry, sunny weather it’ll dry quickly enough to apply three coats to an item of furniture on the same day. Choose a shade that complements the main colours of the flowers or exterior walls surrounding them.
3 LIFT UP SLABS AND PLANT IN PATIO GAPS
Add some extra interest to a flat landscape by taking up a paving slab or two on the patio and popping a feature plant in the space. If slabs are just laid on sand, simply lift them by levering them up with a spade. If they’ve been cemented in place, you’ll need a crowbar and a lump hammer or sledgehammer to release the slab and break up the mortar underneath. Once the slab and cement are removed, fill the gap almost to the top with topsoil before planting. Evergreen shrubs will add a classy look to the patio and if you choose bay or rosemary they’ll be handy ‘at hand’ herbs to pick in the middle of a barbecue!
4 FEED FLOWERING PLANTS OFTEN
It’s easy to forget to feed flowering plants, thinking that they will just ‘do their thing’ in summer without us, but feeding regularly will add more colour to the garden, especially to plants in pots.
Use a feed such as Tomorite, or Richard Jackson’s Flower Power, mixed into your watering can and apply it at half the recommended rate, so you get in the habit of regularly feeding.
As well as promoting flowering, feeds contain nutrients that will keep plants growing strongly.
5 COVER EMPTY WALLS
Putting planters on walls greatly increases the colour potential of the garden and helps to make the most of a small space. Make your own and colour with garden paint, as above, or buy a simple one, such as a Burgon & Ball Vertical Wall Planter, and fill with trailing plants or salad.
6 SWAP STEPPING STONES FOR COLOURED GRAVEL
Replace dull-looking stepping stones or mulch with a coloured alternative, such as colour-coated gravel, glass aggregate or coloured wooden mulch. Take up stepping stones, lay weed-suppressing membrane over the soil and cover with gravel. Lawn edging, such as EverEdge, around the area makes a tidy shape, keeps gravel contained and makes mowing alongside it easier.
7 ADD PLANTS THAT WILL FLOWER UNTIL FROSTS COME
Bedding plants may have been cleared away but garden centres are full of plants in flower, which will provide an instant injection of colour now, and some will flower almost non-stop until the winter arrives. Perennial wallflower erysimum ‘Bowles’s Mauve’ is a real star performer this summer, despite the tricky weather conditions. It keeps pumping out spires of delicate mauve blooms if you keep snipping the old ones off, and it thrives in hot sun and dry soil. Many late-flowering perennials are just starting to bloom and add a freshness to the border or gaps in pots. Heleniums are flower-packed perennial plants that are best planted now when slugs aren’t as rampant as earlier in the year. ‘Sahin’s Early Flowerer’ has flowers in a warm orange that fades to a mellow buttery-yellow. Add perennial coreopsis, rudbeckia and gaillardia, too, for summer and autumn flowers.
8 HANG A MIRROR
Reflecting the most colourful and admirable parts of the garden with a mirror will make it look bigger, as well as exaggerate the impact of the plants in full bloom.
Place mirrors low down so they aren’t in the flight path of garden birds and choose a shady area out of full sun so there’s no danger of the sun’s reflection causing a fire.
9 PUT HOUSEPLANTS OUTSIDE FOR INSTANT ‘POP’
If you’re looking to make the garden lusher and brighter but aren’t keen on shelling out for more plants, you may already have just the plants for the garden! Houseplants such as ficus, spider plants (chlorophytum) and schefflera can all spend the rest of the summer outside. Position houseplants outdoors in a spot out of direct sun so the leaves aren’t scorched. Remember to empty out superfluous water if you’re keeping them in decorative pots without drainage holes.
10 INCLUDE COLOURFUL LEAVES
Plants with eye-catching leaves are perfect for providing consistent brightness and diversity to a garden that’s looking too green in summer. These three will provide brilliant leaves year on year and summer on summer.
Heucheras
There’s a heuchera available in virtually every colour under the sun. In addition, there are many patterned forms such as ‘Chocolate Limes’ with deep purple leaves edged with limegreen, or ‘Red Lightening’, which is luminous green with rusty-red veins. Heucheras have a reputation for being eaten by vine weevil but if they’re grown in the ground rather than in pots, the risk of attack is lower. Now’s the best time to water nematodes onto the soil, which are natural vine weevil predators.
Physocarpus
This deciduous shrub doesn’t shout the loudest at the garden centre, but it’s invaluable for providing strong leaf colour to the garden all summer and into autumn. It’s an extremely tough plant that can be grown in part shade or sun. Try ‘Lady in Red’, which has dark red leaves in summer, or dark purple ‘Diabolo’, to provide a stunning backdrop to a border and help lighter flowers stand out more.
Smoke bush
Cotinus (smoke bushes) are hero shrubs all summer, with their curvy, colourful leaves that are covered by a shroud of billowing, frothy flowers (hence the ‘smoke’ part of the name). But once the flowers are gone, the leaves of varieties such as ‘Royal Purple’ and ‘Golden Spirit’ (inset), bronze, then yellow, will still be standout plants in the garden. Grow them in full sun to get the most gloriously vibrant leaf colours, and choose a sheltered place to site them.