The ultimate guide to yellow daisies: where to plant and what will bloom in late summer – Telegraph.co.uk

No one could say that August is an easy month. If its been too dry the garden lacks energy and zip, like a marathon runner whos hit the 20-mile wall and is wondering where the finish line is.

If its been too wet, the garden dissolves from orderly exuberance into impenetrable jungle. Worse still, every mistake shows. In my case, its too much red crocosmia.

However, the uplifting yellow daisy is about to come to our rescue and produce crisp flowers in a bright colour that suits the silly season perhaps a trifle vulgar at times but extremely enjoyable.

Used properly, yellow runs through the garden like a spinning thread and it leads the eye along paths and through borders better than any other colour.

Shades vary from cool clear-lemon through to gold medallion, but its the warm sunshine-yellows that tend to dominate in August. The earliest arrival to the Second Half of Summer Ball is always Heliopsis helianthoides var. scabra Summer Nights.

This metre-high, dark-stemmed daisy supports a branching head of small yellow flowers, just two inches across. The emerald green foliage has dark veins and each flower has a sizzling, burnished red middle that gets fuzzier as the tiny flowers are pollinated. If you want a suitable forerunner, plant the diminutive daylily Hemerocallis Corky for its dark stems and brown-backed warm-yellow flowers.

Bright yellow is enhanced by dramatic black foliage and the later-flowering black-stemmed aster, Symphyotrichum laeve Calliope, is a self-supporting, September-flowering aster with brooding foliage and thick stems.

Add the fiery nasturtium-red and yellow flowers of Alstroemeria Indian Summer, the best long-flowering alstro Ive ever grown. This has come through searing winters for me, when so many havent. Better still, the dark foliage is equally sumptuous. If youre planting Indian Summer now, add a mulch of compost in late autumn just in case.

Any blend of three or four similar plants always needs a contrast and the dark foliage and fiery flowers could be framed by a foot-high all-green grass, Hakonechloa macra Nicolas. This deciduous grass creates waves of movement and, as temperatures cool, the bright green foliage of Nicolas develops maroon-red flecks. Or add an injection of Oxford-blue and black.

This could be provided by Salvia nemorosa Caradonna, a very useful hardy salvia that retains slender, dark tapers long after the deep blue flowers have dropped. Agastache Blackadder, Blue Fortune and the fluffier Blue Boa will provide vertical bottlebrushes with violet to Cambridge-blue colouring. These aromatic plants are all bee pleasers.

Crocosmia crocosmiiflora Columbus will provide a herringbone of violet-tinted buds that open to rich golden yellow and this shorter crocosmia makes a good front-of-border plant. The sword-like foliage of any crocosmia helps to break up the monotony of mound-forming perennials. Hemerocallis Primal Scream, a substantial pumpkin-orange, could be allowed to cartwheel through your border as well.