I know you’re going to hate me for saying it, but we are now sliding into the last few weeks of summer. Despite the continuing warmth and good light levels, after the riotous floral displays of June and July many gardens can start a slow decline as plants concentrate their efforts on ripening seeds instead of kicking out new flowers. However, there is one simple trick you can try right now to draw out the colour of summer up until the start of autumn. You do it by cheating Mother Nature into offering up one of my favourite flowers out of season: lilies.
If you have a sunny spot in your garden that is starting to look a bit tired, hunt down cold-stored lily bulbs online – there are a few excellent specialist UK nurseries that stock them. Having been kept in the suspended animation of refrigerated conditions to mimic an extended winter, these bulbs will sprout in a matter of days with the warm conditions of high summer accelerating their development, giving you a stunning crop of flowers in record time. Capable of flowering right up until the first frosts, they will give you months of extra colour and incredible scent, long after the other lilies in your garden have gone over. Unfortunately, this cheat only works once, as next year the same bulbs will be in sync with the rest, but there are few plants that put on such an amazing, reliable display.
I particularly love the so-called tree lilies. These are crosses between the oriental and Asiatic types whose mixed parentage gives them the best of both worlds: the dazzling colours of one and the knockout scent of the other. Hybrid vigour means these plants also reach immense proportions, shooting up to 7ft tall to tower above their parent species with their oversized blooms. They are even more tolerant of a wide range of soils than their parents, without the finicky need for strict acid or alkaline conditions. If you want late summer colour in a hurry, it just doesn’t get better.
My favourites are the impossibly exotic flowers of ‘Black Beauty’. Its dramatically recurved, pink and purple speckled petals arch back to reveal long stamens that look like they are going to shoot poison darts at unsuspecting passersby. It’s hard to believe they are tough enough to withstand even Arctic blasts. For more scent, ‘High Tea’ is the one to go for, with its understated cream flowers emitting an intensely sweet aroma on plants just 1.2m high.
Email James at james.wong@observer.co.uk or follow him on Twitter @Botanygeek
