We’ve been honing the late season colour palette of the garden at Genus HQ over the last few years, going from ‘not a lot’ to ‘more than enough’. Each year has seen successes and failures but we’ve been slowly learning what performs well for us and now have a garden that we’re very happy with.
The late season stalwarts Dahlia ‘David Howard’ and ‘Rip City’ play a big part as well as a number of varieties whose labels are long lost, forming a good backbone to the borders. Despite being in the sometimes bleak Cotswold countryside we now leave them in the ground over winter where they happily come back every year.
Helenium and cosmos love our annually mulched soil, and to give height, perennial helianthus and stipa grasses fill the back of the deeper beds. Geums are almost over for us but Geranium ‘Rozanne’ is still making an effort and our reliable clump of Hydrangea ‘Annabelle’ has many more weeks of interest left in it.
It hasn’t happened overnight but we feel at last we have the summer garden we want. We just need to do the same with our early spring garden. Now where did we put that spring bulb catalogue?