Mellow Yellows

"The cure for anything is salt water:

sweat, tears, or the sea" - Isak Dinesen

Gironde Estuary at Barzan Plage -
where ancient Romans came for mud baths!

Whilst salt is a necessity for us humans, it's anathema to most plants. There are gaps in some of the sunflower fields near our house where water from the estuary has encroached in past years.

A mutant thumbing his nose at tourists..?

But on the whole sunflowers - or tournesols - do pretty well around here, providing a welcoming army of smiling faces for arriving tourists, as well as producing the excellent local sunflower oil.

Varieties seem to have shorter stems these days, so there's less wastage at harvest time; even so, these brown and black rustling plants give off great clouds of dust when they're finally cut down in October.

That, and the grape harvest, will be a signal that summer is truly over.

Courtyard seating areas

Meanwhile, we continue to enjoy hot sunny days followed by cool nights, which is the perfect recipe for a good night's sleep and helps to revive our sometimes flagging plants.

Despite high temperatures, we've taken the risk of planting out some of my newly-raised Sweet Williams (aka 'Sooty') so that they can fill the gaps left by larkspur and other annuals.

Lavender, Echinacea and Salvia
turkestanica alba - in full flourish

One can't help panicking when big spaces appear and there isn't an appropriate 'filler' to hand!

Cosmos is indispensible at this stage and luckily some of last year's seeds have begun to sprout in the borders. Given a bit of water, they are easily lifted and transplanted into new spots.

For insurance, I also sowed a small tray of Cosmos sulphurea, which came up straight away and will be ready to plant in ten days.

Crocosmia 'Emily McKenzie'
starting to emerge

After all the pinks and mauves of echinacea and lavender which dominated the first half of July, the hotter shades of late summer are beginning to take centre stage.

With rudbeckias and heleniums now in full flower, the colour of the moment is yellow - and various shades thereof - going through orange into red.

This is epitomised by the swordlike shafts of crocosmia which have gradually come into bloom, starting out rather snakelike (as here on the left) and finally throwing back their heads in a full-throated display of hot colour.

Emily cooling off in a sudden shower

We planted this vibrant crocosmia in our semi-shaded border, next to the dark leaves of Actaea simplex atropurpurea. Captured in a strong evening light, 'Emily McKenzie' glows almost scarlet against the backdrop of deep purple foliage. A really dramatic plant - smaller and more delicate than the popular 'Lucifer'.

Echinacea purpurea

Echinaceas are still a mainstay in the border, attaining a height of almost 2m - due in no small part to Christina's excellent watering system!

I love them in their emergent phase, as shown here; but once again their colours intensify as the flowers mature and they too look wonderful in the glow of late afternoon and evening.

We now have them in shades of pink, green and cream - any of which are useful for cutting.

Yellow Rudbeckia hirta, with white Shasta
Daisy, blue Scabious, orange Cosmos and
Helenium 'Sahin's Early Flowerer'

All the flowers shown here last for a week or more in water, with the exception of Cosmos sulphurea which tends to droop after a couple of days.

Lavender blooms are starting to go to seed, save for those we cut back in June which now have small young flowers. Instead we can pick a few stems of dark flowering salvia, like Salvia guarantiaca 'Black and Blue', which has finally got going after a slow start and provides bold contrast to all those orangey yellows.

Nicotiana 'Lime Green'
underplanted with lobelia 

Every year we promise ourselves to drastically reduce the number of pots we have to water... it seems such a waste of time and compost. But quite often we succumb to an impulse-buy of some colourful annual, only to find we have nothing to use for edging around a pot.

For me, lobelia has always been a perfect accessory, especially the Cambridge Blue trailing variety which is impossible to buy later in the season. So this year, I ordered seeds from Chiltern Seeds in the UK and started growing them in my trusty cold-frame back in April.

Being such tiny seeds, they tend to clump together and, when they finally came up, the threadlike seedlings were pretty impossible to prise apart without causing damage... yes, I should have mixed them with sand before sowing! Hence I had to prick them out and plant them up in clumps, which is not ideal for the development of their roots.

Lobelia erinus pendula 'Blue Fountain'

That said, most of the plants survived well and have been blooming away in three different containers; the green tobacco plant above was a spare seedling which we couldn't bear to throw away and it's turned into a handsome pot plant.

The lobelia itself seems to do best in semi shade where its blue flowers are two-toned and look lovely with grey leaved plants such as lavender. I'm hoping it will seed itself around the courtyard and provide us with easy-grow plants next year!

Verbascum nigrum

 Yellow natives

On a recent stroll around the site of a Roman amphitheatre which is being excavated locally, we walked through a meadow of lemon yellow mullein which was alive with buzzing insects. This is a shorter, more dainty version of the statuesque mullein, Verbascum densiflorum, which can reach to 4m on chalky banks and has grey-green foliage like the garden variety.

Tetragonolobus maritimus

In the same area of scrubby limestone soil, we came across these soft pillows of yellow vetch - a wild flower which goes by the surprising name of Dragon's-teeth, due to the long seed pods which eventually form.

It's a salt-tolerant plant and may well have existed there since Roman times when the supposed port of Novioregum would have been much closer to the shore.

An estuary vineyard, unfazed by salt-laden winds