Nothing but flowers

My favourite blooms in the garden this autumn, and suggestions for adding winter colour to your yard

I am currently entirely preoccupied with flowers.

This isn’t all that surprising given my new book, A Year in Blooms: The Insider’s Blueprint (a guide to growing a year-round flower garden) is almost finished (it comes out this May!). Although I have always loved the flowers in my garden, writing this book has made me focus on them in a much more tactical way; logging everything that’s flowering across the months and seasons, working out what pairs well together, trying to crack the code that will give me flowers to pick and bring inside no matter the date or the weather.

Today, I wanted to share a sneak peek of some of my favourites with you.

The fact is, it’s easy to grow a flower garden in spring. In spring, we take flowers for granted. But anything that blooms now, as the clouds begin to gather and the days grow shorter, is so much more special and valuable - a bright point amid gloomy weather. There are so many plants you can grow over the next six months to make your garden a place you still want to visit, even on the chilly days. And not enough of us are growing these things in our gardens.

(It’s also just plain lovely learning to see your garden as this seasonal orchestra; picturing the waves of colour that each kind of plant will fling out into the space for its brief little window of time, knowing how to preempt and predict each flowering window, and working out how to plant your garden to maximise the beauty and joy it gives you). For now, here is an autumn snapshot of our garden - the flowers, the wilderness, the third-trimester-with-a-toddler-too-buggered-to-garden unkemptness.

But mostly the flowers.

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A wild patch of garden; two kinds of purple salvias (the one closest to the bottom is called Limelight - I love the lime green and purple flower heads!), miscanthus grass, pink canna lilies in the distance and the brown, dried seed heads of my ornamental tobacco (the seeds are like tiny black grains of sand).

Autumn flowers