Ann Mackay: Inspired by Nature

The flowers of autumn will soon be a memory. There are still some around but most are are gradually ebbing away and there will soon be very few left to photograph.

My photo files are full of reminders of the flowers that I’ve seen this year. The photos of the two pink flowers here stood out among the more recent ones because of their vivid pink. It’s easy to think of pink as being delicate and soft, but these two are as boldly-coloured as any of the red or orange flowers of late summer. The echinacea in the top photo is a particularly strong shade and brighter than the more dusky pink echinaceas that I’ve had in my own garden.

Sadly there have been no established echinacea plants in my garden this year. The red one that lit up summertime for the last few years has at last petered out, but there are a couple of tiny seedlings. (Echinaceas are short-lived, but do carry on by self-seeding.) Other echinaceas in a mix of orange and pink shades didn’t last quite as long as the red one, but I’ve seen the odd seedling that has managed to produce a flower…hopefully they’ll survive and become bigger plants in future.

The Japanese anemone below is attractive, but not something I’m looking to plant here. I already have two other pink Japanese anemones that are being very greedy for space, so best not to risk another! I’ll be happy to just admire it in other people’s gardens. But, while I’m unlikely to choose this anemone, I’d be very happy to grow the vibrantly pink echinacea. It’s very pink and it’s fabulous!

Plants in the Asteraceae family bring charm and loveliness to late summer and autumn. Amongst those plants, asters (also known as Michaelmas daisies) are especially valued for their late flowering, as are other daisy-like flowers in this family. I like the thought that ‘aster’ means ‘star’ in both Latin and ancient Greek; for me the composite flowers of the Asteraceae are, indeed, stars of the garden.

The aster in the top photo appeals to me due to its dramatically dark purple, and I’ve looked around to see if I can buy something like it for my own garden. I haven’t found one yet, but last year I planted my favourite aster, the lavender-blue flowered ‘Monch’. (The photo below is not my own plant though, but one photographed at Fullers Mill, as the are the others here.)

There are a number of asters in my own garden now, mostly in purply-blue shades, but some pinks and white too. They keep the colour going when other flowers have finished and give a feeling of continuing life to the garden. Anything that helps to hold off the gathering greys of approaching winter is very welcome here!

I’d like to plant more late-flowering members of the Asteraceae, perhaps the dainty flower pictured below. I believe it’s probably Bidens heterophylla aurea. (Coreopsis verticillata ‘Moonbeam’ looks very similar, but appears to have slightly narrower petals. It is also a shorter and more compact plant.) This bidens (AKA Arizona beggarticks) has long, graceful stems that give the plant an airy feel, like gaura or Verbena bonariensis. This should make it easy to combine with other plants. I think it could be lovely with a delicate, wispy grass such as Stipa tenuissima (Mexican feather grass).

Some of the autumn-flowering Asteraceae are a bit less obviously daisy-like in appearance, like the dahlia below. However, you can easily see the family likeness in that centre made up of tiny individual ‘disc florets’, surrounded by the showier ‘ray florets’ (which we think of as petals). Rudbeckias, sunflowers, chrysanthemums, cosmos and zinnias are some of the varied members of this large family that can keep flowering when other plants have finished for the year. (You can see some of my previous photos of late-flowering Asteraceae in these posts: heleniums, cosmos, and zinnias. The Asteraceae bring beauty to our gardens in late summer and autumn and they’re all sparkling stars to me.

Japanese anemones tend to go a bit mad here. They have lovely flowers that grace the late summer and autumn garden. But they can spread – oh, how they can spread! So it’s probably not a good idea for me to fall in love with the anemone that you see here.

This is one of the ‘Swan’ series of anemones, which began with the single-flowered ‘Wild Swan’. This first plant was immensely popular, becoming the RHS Chelsea Flower Show plant of the year for 2011. Since then, further cultivars have been grown in the ‘Swan’ family, and I think the plant here is likely to be the semi-double ‘Ruffled Swan’.

Ruffled Swan is a taller and more vigorous cultivar than Wild Swan, so might be inclined to try to take over my garden, just as the pink Japanese anemones ‘September Charm’ and ‘Hadspen Abundance’ do. For years I’ve been trying to keep these two under control, which works for a while until some pops up somewhere where it’s not wanted. (Hadspen Abundance was in the garden when we came and I was pleased to see it. That was before I knew that some Japanese anemones want to rule the world! And I brought a pot of September Charm from my old garden, where it had quietly sat in a small clump before running amok here.)

So, despite its beauty, I won’t be looking to buy this particular plant for the garden. I see that there are, however, some smaller cultivars with the same attractive violet-blue reverse to the petals. The most compact is said to be ‘Elfin Swan’, which would probably grow well in a container. It’s a ‘definite maybe’, but first of all I need to see if I can move some of the larger pink anemones into big pots. (I notice that the dry weather has made these much less vigorous this year, so maybe this is my chance to end their takeover of my garden!) 🌼

The colchicums (autumn crocuses) that I’m familiar with are those that are pink with a white throat. I’ve seen them here and there in other gardens and even tried growing them here. They’re not uncommon. But these white colchicums are something that I haven’t seen before.

These are part of the large collection of Colchicum autumnale growing in Fullers Mill Garden. (I posted photos of a pink and white variety that grows there a couple of weeks ago. You can see them here.)

Whilst the pink and white ones are very pretty, there’s a startling purity to these white flowers that feels unusual when surrounded by the glowing reds, oranges and yellows of many autumn flowers. The white, especially when combined with nearby green, gives a freshness and a feeling of cool and calm that is especially welcome after the blaze of summer heat.

Colchicum autumnale is sometimes called ‘meadow saffron’, but the whole plant is highly toxic and should not be mistaken for the source of the spice saffron. (Saffron actually comes from the saffron crocus, Crocus sativus, an entirely unrelated plant. Somewhat confusingly, this crocus also blooms in autumn.) It may be best to stick with calling these flowers either the commonly used ‘autumn crocuses’, or perhaps the more amusing ‘naked ladies’ (so-called because the flowers appear long before the leaves). It might get a few startled looks if you’re able to tell folk that your garden is full of naked ladies…

The flowers of this bright red Hesperantha coccinea ‘Major’ (AKA crimson flag lily or river lily) are bright enough to rival the glow of other late summer flowers. They can easily compete with Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’, the heleniums, bright red kniphofia and ginger lilies from some of my recent posts.

While this hesperantha’s colour is rich and glowing, its flower has great elegance too. The simple curving shapes of the petals and the way the flowers are held on the long stems give the plant a graceful air. The detail that perfects it for me is the long style that divides into three and overlaps the petal edges. (The style is the female part of the flower’s anatomy that connects the pollen receptor to the ovary.)

I love the look of these flowers, but have found it difficult to keep this plant going in my own garden. The dry soil here isn’t suitable for them, as you’d guess from the ‘river lily’ name, and my attempts to keep them watered haven’t been enough. Hesperantha prefers damp soil, but the roots might rot if I tried planting it in the pond.

It would be good to find a suitable place to grow these…perhaps in their own little bog garden. (The bog garden I made a few years ago has now filled up with Siberian irises, so not much space there.) The beauty of these flowers, which can last until the first frosts, would make the extra effort to create a second bog garden worthwhile. It would have to be a very small bog garden though!

At first glance these photographs look as if they may be of spring crocuses. But these are bigger and in flower right now. In fact, despite the common name of ‘autumn crocus’, these aren’t crocuses but colchicums. This plant looks as if it is probably Colchicum ‘The Giant’; it certainly had very big flowers.

(Before we go further, let me mention that there are true autumn-flowering crocuses. Crocus speciosus, AKA Bieberstein’s crocus, is a lovely soft lilac-blue and the saffron crocus, Crocus sativus, also blooms in autumn.)

There are a number of different colchicums available to gardeners, mostly in shades of pinky-lilac but there are others with pure white flowers too. (I saw some of those on this visit to Fullers Mill Garden, but will save those photos for a later post.) There were also different flower shapes amongst the colchicums I saw, some with double pink flowers (probably ‘Waterlily’) and others with long, spidery-looking petals. There was even a yellow-flowered variety, Colchicum luteum.

I have grown a few colchicum bulbs in pots in the past (they didn’t come back the next year). I don’t grow them now. That’s because this plant is a member of the lily family, and, like the lily, is toxic to cats. In fact, every part of the colchicum is highly toxic and the RHS recommend that gloves should be worn when handling or planting bulbs. So they’re not a good choice if you have young children or pets. Sometimes it’s best not to have a plant in your own garden, but to just admire it growing elsewhere!

The flowers here look like lilies, and their common name is ‘swamp lily’, but they are not part of the Lilium family. They are Crinums – a different genus. This one looks as if it is probably Crinum x powellii (Powell’s swamp lily). It’s a beauty that I have often admired during visits to Fullers Mill Garden and this year I photographed it several times there, from early July ’til mid-September.

I can’t help feeling that this lovely flower deserves a more glamourous name than swamp lily, even if it is a fair description of where it may be found in its native habitat. (Though, from what I’ve read, it seems to be happy in soil that is just reasonably moist rather than soggy, and can tolerate some drought.)

The clumps of crinum that I saw at Fullers Mill were big – a few foot across – and about 4ft or more tall, so they’re too big for me to fit in to my modestly sized garden. In any case, I reckon my soil is not quite good enough for them because they prefer a soil that is rich, deep, and moist. (Maybe someday, when I’ve added enough compost and the humus has built up…)

These imposing flowers are large, but at the same time are elegant. They’re not a common sight here, in fact, I can only remember seeing them in a few gardens. Perhaps they’re more common in areas of the UK with a higher rainfall than Suffolk. That scarcity makes coming across a crinum all the more special and I’m very glad that they’re one of the pleasures of spending time in a favourite garden. Perhaps they will still have some flowers on my next visit.

There was an end-of-summer feel to the day I took these photographs. We were visiting Bressingham Gardens in Norfolk at the end of August, on a day that was windy and rather cloudy. Our long, hot summer of blue skies and little rain has come to an end. Even so, there was plenty of colour still in these huge gardens, mainly from late-flowering perennials.

Some of the flowers we saw had strikingly vibrant colours, like the ginger lily above, which, according to the nearby label, is Hedychium ‘Tara’. (These gardens were originally created to display perennial plants grown by the Blooms of Bressingham Nursery, so, very conveniently for me, many of them are labelled.) This ginger lily is one of the hardier varieties, which tolerates temperatures down to around -10ºC and can be planted outside. Although there are a few frost-hardy varieties, ginger lilies can rot if they get very wet and some can be tender, so may be best planted in a pot and given protection from winter in a greenhouse or conservatory.

Other brightly glowing flowers included several different cultivars of red hot pokers (Kniphofia) in various shades of orange. The ones that stood out to me the most, though, were the daintier red flowers on the short-growing plant shown below. I prefer the look of these to the large bi-coloured kniphofia varieties, such as the familiar red and yellow ones that you often see.

The flower spike of the ginger lily suggested to me a trail of orange sparks flaring from a firework, and the little kniphofia flowers nearby made a burst of glowing mini-rockets that blazed against a dark background. Fanciful perhaps, but these warm and vivid colours made the flowers feel like an end of summer celebration as they gave a radiant performance to end the season. Floral fireworks are a joyful way to say goodbye to the summer and hello to autumn.

Last month I saw these flower spikes of eucomis (pineapple lily) making an impressive show in a sunny garden border. The range of their colours, from white through pinks and peachy tones to the dark wine-red buds and stems, made them a most attractive sight. (And, of course, an irresistible subject for a photograph or two.)

My photographs don’t show the reason for the ‘pineapple lily’ name because the little cluster of leaves at the very top of the spike hadn’t yet grown to their full size. (You can just see the still-tiny leaves amongst the topmost flower buds.) Once they are fully-grown, these leaves sit in a little upright crown above the flowers, giving the appearance of a floral pineapple. (You can see what a green-flowered cultivar looks like when it has matured, and is creating its pineapple impersonation in this post.)

I wondered if eucomis might be drought-resistant enough for me to plant in my own garden, but it flowers best if it’s not allowed to dry out during growth. With our rainfall being so low, I feel that I should choose plants that can cope with little water. All the same, I’m tempted to try this plant, which appears to be Eucomis comosa ‘Sparkling Burgundy’. (Even the leaves can be spectacular – they’re a deep purplish-red in spring, before turning green in summer.) Perhaps it would be a good candidate for growing in a pot, which could then be taken into the protection of the conservatory in winter. It would certainly add a bit of excitement to the garden in late summer.