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It wasn’t so long ago that the beauty & value of the herbaceous border was lost on me. Too many names & species, too many colours & clashes. Gertrude Jekyll’s ‘Colour in the Garden’ was a tome of mystery & fantasy that passed me by with all the allure of a trip to the dentist . The traditional herbaceous border with its ranks of tall perennials was dead in the water & the heady delights of shrubs & conifers made life easy. Evergreen or deciduous, spring or summer flowering, acid loving or native to chalky soils, my perception was that it was just so much more simple to go down that road. Then the opportunity to study plants with the chance of seeing what perennials could do came along. Visiting places like Dixter, buying plants & experimenting with the combinations, just feeling at ease with this previously terrifying array of leafy green plants made all the difference. Just like a child with a new box of paints, I just dived in & immersed myself with the joy & passion that a good planting scheme can give you (& I even managed to fall asleep in the dentists chair last time I visited, but I don’t think there’s a connection).
To my mind the best time for a garden is late summer into early autumn. The colours are rich, the perennials are at their best (most of them), & the garden looks as it should. At the time of writing the sun has driven the temperature up to 90° F & from my office widow I can see a swathe of Helenium ‘Moerhiem Beauty’ blazing its way through the stripy variegated uprights of Miscanthus sinensis ‘Zebrinus’. Lovely contrasts, very pleasing effect. As the season dips towards autumn, the Miscanthus will reach up to 6 ft & the Helenium will have a second flush of flowers if I remember to deadhead them. The mixed border in September is what you make it. Structure is important, as this will carry the border through the winter without it looking too dead until the snowdrops appear. Grasses are my passion & since I last wittered on about them more & more have appeared in my garden & I think that I should pass on a few of these to you. Bronze grasses (sometimes referred to by some of my clients as ‘those dead grasses’) come into their own in the late season & having evergreen (or everbronze?) qualities are a good border plant to carry over to the spring. Carex buchananii or Carex flagellifera are worth a look though they can be easy to confuse (especially as garden centres do mislabel them frequently). Flagellifera is more upright & has corkscrew tips & buchananii is flatter with thin blade like leaves (but it might be the other way round!!). Eragrostis curvula or African Love Grass has a fine spray of seed heads that last all winter without being overbearing. Pennisetum alopecuroides is difficult to spell but is a spectacular grass with arching leaves & ‘bottle-brush’ flowers that comes in all shapes & sizes from the tiny ‘Little Bunny’ to the flamboyant ‘Burgundy Giant’. The names say everything about those two. Stipa calamagrostis is almost like a miniature pampas grass but without the razor sharp leaves, but don’t let that put you off as is a superb plant in it’s own right. The extraordinarily named Stipa extremorientale is similar but with more open & feathery flowers. Most Stipa are worth investigation. Other names to play with are Panicum virgatum, Deschampsia cespitosa, & Molinia caerula. There are many cultivars of these three but all are worth a punt if you spot one in the local nursery. So what do you mix with your grasses to create that special late summer look? My favourites are Rudbeckia, Helenium, Aster (but not most of the garish nova-belgii & nova-angliae varieties), hardy Geranium, Eupatorium (Joe Pye Weed), Eryngium (Sea Holly), & Verbena bonariensis. Check out any book that has the name Piet Oudolf on the cover for more detailed ideas, & if I have finally convinced you that grasses are plants to be passionate about, get your hands on ‘The Colour Encyclopedia of Ornamental Grasses’ by Rick Darke (Wiedenfield & Nicholson - £30). He’ll tell you more about grasses than I will in a month of articles. |
