Enjoy your garden’s spring glories – while keeping an eye on late summer

I’ve ever had the acquisition and the curse of an overactive consciousness of foresight. It means I’m bully astatine readying things, but possibly rather anxiety-inducing to beryllium around. This week’s file is precise overmuch the merchandise of both, but I’ve been encouraged to constitute it by having near-identical requests from friends get astatine the aforesaid clip of year, 2 years running: each was readying an important solemnisation successful their plot (a wedding and a naming ceremony) successful precocious summer, and wanted them to beryllium successful afloat bloom for the occasion.

As a royal parks gardener erstwhile said to me: “If it could beryllium May for ever, I’d beryllium happy.” It’s a glorious month: everything is soft, caller and dewy. There’s capable anticipation in the crushed and the aerial to animate a daily inspection of what’s arrived overnight. The days are long, but thing feels overbearing yet. The thud and the inevitable horticultural failures of midsummer, the adust crushed and drying lawns, are connected the distant horizon. Lovely May.

The anxiety-inducing planner successful maine wants to heartily promote you to intermission this reverie to ideate August oregon September. You stopped watering regularly a fewer weeks ago, erstwhile you went connected holiday. The slugs returned during that miserable grey spot successful July. But much than this: your plot looked heavenly successful May, and truthful you considered your occupation done and didn’t privation to judge determination were 4 months of bully plot clip ahead. Now each the flowers person gone over. It is somewhat depressing.

But it doesn’t person to be. Now is the clip erstwhile you tin springiness a acquisition to your aboriginal aforesaid and adhd plants that volition connection precocious summertime colour.

It possibly isn’t astonishing that I thin to marque gardens that look champion successful late summer – I’ve thrown my ain life-event parties past too. I emotion that last-chance-saloon feeling that arrives with the autumn equinox; I emotion adding plants that drawback September’s spiderwebs and sticky sunsets.

Here are immoderate guaranteed bangers: Japanese anemone; Agastache; Achillea; Hylotelephium (or sedums); Salvia (they’ll support blooming into November); Altheas, I person the smaller, much ditsy A. cannabina and its half-sisters, what I deliberation of arsenic the posh hock, Alcalthaea suffrutescens ‘Parkfrieden’ and ‘Parkallee’, successful some the gravel bed, wherever they romp away, and the shadier beds. Persicaria are reliable doers successful beds passim the summer, their elegant foliage politely filling successful gaps, but P. amplexicaulis shoots retired agelong floral spears successful heavy pinks and reds, oregon achromatic (‘Alba’).

These are my favourites, but I privation to impressment the request to find immoderate of your own. By present you’ll person the makings of a colour palette, and an consciousness of wherever the gaps successful your beds are; it’s not excessively precocious to plonk immoderate 9cm pots successful and marque your aboriginal aforesaid grateful.