The August gap: nothing between the geraniums and the asters
A border that is good in June is easy; almost everything flowers in June. The Sunday photographs from this year tell the real story. The 15 June picture is full: geraniums, salvias, alchemilla, the first astrantia, the delphiniums still upright. The 13 July picture is still decent. The 3 August picture is green with some brown in it and two spots of colour, and the one from today is much the same, except that the asters at the far end have begun. Between the second week of July and the last week of August the border is resting, and I did not notice until I laid the pictures side by side.
The causes are mostly what I planted. Nearly everything is an early or midsummer perennial, because that is what was in flower at the nursery when I bought it in late spring, which is exactly the trap everyone warns about. The few things that should carry August, the echinacea and a single helenium, are either dead or lonely. And I was slow with the shears: the geraniums and alchemilla, cut back hard in early July, would have made fresh leaf and a second flush by now; left alone, they went brown and flopped.
So the list for the autumn planting is made with the photographs open on the table rather than with the catalogue. Plants that start in late July and go into September, chosen for clay and for a small space: more salvias, cut back after the first flowering so they repeat; Japanese anemones for the shady end, which I know flower from August because the neighbour’s are out now; sedums along the sunny front, which are already colouring in gardens around here; a tall purple verbena that will seed itself about; and a few more heleniums in the one spot where the soil drains, with grit.
The other change costs nothing. Next year, in the first week of July, the geraniums, the alchemilla and the early salvias all get cut to the ground, watered, and left to come again. I did it to one geranium as a test on 20 July this year and it is in full fresh leaf with flower buds three weeks later.
The Sunday photograph is the best gardening tool I own. It does not remember how the border felt; it shows what it looked like, which turns out to be different.