Small is beautiful
The smaller-flowered calibrachoas are also top-notch for long-lasting blooms. There are incredible textured varieties, in the deepest, richest colours, and I’ve fallen completely for the silk velvet Calibrachoa ‘Cabaret Red’ and two tones darker ‘Cancan Black Cherry’ for massive summer and autumn value.
The Cosmos ‘Sonata’ or ‘Sensation’ series (which comes in carmine, soft pink and white) and some of the container-sized dahlias have excellent flower power, but both benefit from the odd bout of dead-heading. Better still, if you’re short of garden space, think of these two families as sources of cut flowers as well as contents for your containers, and instead of dead-heading them to keep them going, bring small bunches into the house a couple of times a week as an extra bonus. Both cosmos and dahlias are cut-and-come-again, so if you pick the individual flowers immediately above a pair of leaves, an axillary bud will form just below, which will produce next week’s flower — and so on for months at a stretch.
Dahlia ‘Happy Single Kiss’ and ‘Rock Star’ are perfect, compact dahlias with relatively good vase lives that are ideal for this sort of treatment. Dahlia ‘Isabel’, whose flowers open pink and then gradually develop into a terracotta shade, is a dual-purpose winner, but my current top favourite dahlia is the stellar, glamour queen ‘Honka Fragile’. Two tubers of this will fill a whopper pot with Catherine wheel flowers from July until November, and it’s also marvellous as a flower for arranging.