Top August Plants
Golden hews and vibrant yellows blast the borders as the garden combusts before autumn. Rudbeckia Deamii is below.
Best Garden Room
The yellow bed in the Front Garden has already lived up to its name for five months but now it’s bursting with blooms: rudbeckias, crocosmia (below), hot pokers and various helianthus.
Lucky combinations
Sometimes two unlikely plants bring out the best in each other – such as the monada and smokebush pictured). Find out the secrets of partner planting
East Ruston Old Vicarage is a modern garden with endless rooms that is a shrine to classic garden design
The record breaking August heatwave followed by rain so biblical that animals started leaving the garden in pairs. It left us wondering: ‘how on earth does it all still look so good?’
Plants huh? They never cease to amaze.
Top August plants
Converts to Persicaria
We team up hot colours with rich yellows alongside bright reds such as Mexican Salvias, Crocosmia Lucifer and, now, Persicarias. We're recent converts to the new varieties of Persicaria (also known as Polygonium). Its long-lasting fox-tail brushes wave above companions in the borders. Pictured is the apply named Firetail.
Top plants – when they flower – what they bring to the garden
| 1. Rudbeckia Triloba | July-Oct | Dozens of small black-eyed-susan blooms |
| 2. Helianthus | June-Oct | Small sunflower saucers of deeper yellow |
| 3. Persicaria Firetail | June-Sept | Blood red brushes dancing up high |
| 4. Aster Frikartii Monch | July-Sept | Purple daisies with yellow eyes |
| 5. Crocosmia George Davison | July-Aug | Orangey-yellow sprays |
| 6. Smoke Bushes | May-Aug | Penny-perfect leaves filtering the lights |
| 7. Sedum Purple Emperor | July-Sept | Fleshy garnet stems and leaves |
| 8. Astrantia Major Shaggy | June-Aug | Chunky White UFO flowers |
| 9. Hydrangea Annabelle | June-Sept | Wobbling globes of white lace |
| 10. Agapanthus | June-Aug | Star-burst spheres of mid-blue |
And more...
| Red-hot pokers |
| Agastache Apollo |
| Diascia |
| Ligularia |
| Micanthus Morning-Light grass |
| Echinops |
| Salvia Black and Blue |
| Sanguisorba |
| Hemp (Eupatorium) |
| Water Lilies |
| Lysimachia |
| Japanese anenomies |
The Front Garden
The Front Garden is a catch-all area both sides of the front drive and either side of Whitebeam Allee’s yew hedge. One side of the hedge is an almost entirely yellow garden. A mix of roses, climbers, shrubs and perennials.
There’s a gravel area hidden away where we take coffee at almost anytime of year. In August it’s bursting with deep yellows.
By the potting shed a different bed is now overflowing with Hydrangea Annabelle, while another narrow bed is full of pinks and reds: Diascias, Penstemons and four species of Mexican Salvias.
Garden Rooms in August
East Ruston Old Vicarage
Scale is what we gardeners so rarely get right, but this fairly modern (in gardening terms) coastal Norfolk garden is an object lesson in how to do it. The house is hidden from the road by trees and shrubs and the garden ever-extending in all other directions between high windbreak hedges and down well-proportioned allees.
Vistas frame the Happisburgh Lighthouse and the nearby church. Different garden areas open up including a potager and a dry-river bed garden with exotic planting such as the spiky succulent (left).
A wild meadow of blue corn-flowers and corn marigolds is shown above.
Wild spectacle: Poppies
Only bluebell woods could challenge poppy-saturated corn-fields as the archetypal British wild spectacle. When you catch sight of an undulating golden wheat or barley field, just ready for harvest and flooding with scarlet, it seems to come from a bygone age – probably pre-glyphosate.
Thanks to David Marsden (theanxiousgardener.com) for the picture.
