Like many people, I experience a creep of melancholia as the end of August approaches. It’s likely instinctive but was reinforced in childhood and through adolescence. Thankfully it’s no longer accompanied by a sense of foreboding about the looming school year ahead.
Similar to when I was a schoolboy, the dread quickly subsides with the onset of September and the mental calendar starts to focus on a fresh landmark.
In spite of this fleeting late summer sadness, or possibly because of it, it’s a time I relish in the garden. Only early June comes close, when all around there’s nothing but upright, green growth and bright flowers and buds ready to pop.
I love the less intense light of late summer as it filters through canopies that are at their most dense onto plants whose flesh is crisping and lightening as the life slowly drains from them.
Late August, early September is the period when the sorts of plants I like best are in their prime. Tall perennials, reminiscent of those that inhabit the great prairies, sing loudest for their swan song, while the golden seedheads of grasses sway on the breeze, bring a fresh dimension to the garden’s visual dynamic.
There are a handful of plants which are key to this look. Some are common and have been around for decades, while others have come to prominence more recently and have therefore labelled pejoratively as ‘trendy’. Together, preferably planted in numbers in irregular drifts, they create a late summer display that when captured in the right light will be etched in your head for months to come...
Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Fat Domino’
A favourite of Piet Oudolf, the Dutch landscape gardener behind the New Perennial Movement, this cultivar belongs to the same family as our own redshank (Persicaria maculosa) that’s found in meadows or on the edge of arable land, flowering from June to October. ‘Fat Domino’’ is one of many long-flowering varieties that share the same habit of dense lower foliage with tall spikes in various shades of red.
Rudbeckia ‘Goldsturm’
AKA ‘black eyed Susans’, these daisy-like flowers with a deep brown centre and yellow petals are synonymous with heady August days. The profusion of star-like blooms, which while appearing delicate are very tough, is another facet of this North American native. A member of the aster family, it’s also extremely robust and requires only cursory maintenance. A worthy holder of the RHS’s Award of Garden Merit.
Calamagrotis x acutifolia ‘Karl Foerster’
To the uninitiated this ornamental grass may appear underwhelming, like something you’d encounter in a reed bed – which is exactly right. This so-called feather reed grass is a hybrid of two species named in honour of ‘Karl Foerster’, the German nurseryman and horticultural visionary who discovered it in Hamburg’s Botanical Garden in the 1930s. It’s the essential component in a prairie planting scheme and was the backbone of New American Garden style that Foerster later popularised when he moved across the Atlantic.
Geranium ‘Rozanne’
A versatile plant that works in pots, borders and prairie-style schemes, you’ll go a long way to find better bang for your buck. A ‘hardy geranium’ closely related to the native cranesbill, Rozanne is the relative newcomer that takes its name from is Mrs Rozanne Waterer, who in the late 1980s along with husband Donald, noticed something different about a plant at their Crooked Acre garden in Somerset. It flowers from June until November – considerably longer than any of its counterparts, with abundant violet-blue blooms.
