Top ten plants for August

An elegant looking, white flowered, plant. This long lived perennial is ideal planted at the back of a border.  Consider leaving spent flowers on the stem so that birds can feed on the fluffy seedheads over winter.

Who doesn’t love to see butterflies in the garden on a warm sunny day? This deciduous, shrub is very likely to attract them with its long tapering clusters of pink-purple flowers which flower over a long time during summer and into autumn.  It’s also drought tolerant and easy to grow making it the perfect choice for the busy gardener; all that’s needed is to cut back the shrub low in March taking off all the previous year’s growth which will then encourage the plant to produce lots of flowers later that year.

These undemanding, easy to grow plants are much loved by bees and butterflies.  Recently renamed with a bit of a tongue twister ‘hylotelephium’!  These will look great in most gardens whether you’re going for a cottage garden, wildlife garden or even a gravel garden.

This big, bright, lemon-yellow flowering perennial will happily compete with your annual sunflowers and comes with the added bonus that, despite being tall, it doesn’t need staking!  It’s vigorous and eventually forms good size clumps; ideal for the very back of borders.

These reliable plants are an easy way to introduce late summer colour to the garden, with their arching stems of small lily-like rich orange colour flowers growing out from clumps of long thin leaves.

Hailing from South Africa this half-hardy exotic will wow your guests with its large blue blooms which burst into flower in mid-to-late summer and last for weeks on end.  It’s perfect for both borders and growing in pots on patio as long as you can give it well-drained soil and a very sunny site.  If you’ve got heavy soil then mixing a lot of grit and some pieces of broken terracotta pots into the soil just before planting should help give it the conditions it loves.

There are loads of different varieties of asters to choose from and ‘Mönch’ is not only one of the earliest but also one of the longest flowering ones.  It’s a well-behaved disease resistant plant, forming a neat dome which rewards you with a constant display of large single, lilac colour daisy flowers well into autumn and is also much loved by butterflies and bees.

This is a lovely short shrub that does well in most aspects as long as it’s kept well-watered and grown in free draining soil.  It has large blue centred flowers surrounded by pale blue or pink (depending on your soil type) florets with the added bonus of a glorious autumn display of crimson coloured leaves.

Most of us hope for a long hot Indian Summer and this aptly named variety sets the scene nicely with its bronze colour leaves and masses of burnt orange and yellow coloured flowers flecked with dark purple covering the plant for months on end.  Suitable for pots or planting in cottage garden style or cut flower borders.

This compact plant will grow well in a border or in containers on a patio. The showy yellow flowers are spotted with red speckles, giving an interesting impact. Deadhead them to encourage more flowering, leaving them to dieback in autumn.