Colour me beautiful

Summer pots should be a riot of colour, ideally with flowers that bloom into autumn. Hannah Stephenson looks at trials of new patio plants to find out which will be worth growing this year

AS SUMMER beckons, many gardeners will now be deciding which patio plants to feature in their scheme, but it’s a difficult job as there’s so much choice and plants can vary greatly in quality.

The perfect summer container plant should be long-flowering and disease-resistant. But many don’t do that job.

To save you some of the bother of trial and error, Which? Gardening, the Consumers’ Association magazine in Britain, has now produced a report after growing more than 35 new varieties suited to containers or baskets before they were released to the public.

The plants, which were bought as plugs or young plugs last April, were grown in good quality container compost with added slow-release fertiliser.

The planted containers were kept in polytunnels until all risk of frost had passed and then brought out in June, watered and deadheaded as required.

Among the pick of the crop were Osteospermum Serenity series (Mr Fothergill’s; Unwins), with its soft pastel or terracotta-toned flowers that mature to a deeper, warmer shade, and the Nemesia Lady series, a deliciously scented variety which looked great in mixed plantings with Calibrachoa ’Can-Can Rose Star’ and Pelargonium ’Caliente Pink’.

The white Nemesia ’Sweet Lady’ was the longest flowering of three highly scented varieties and still looked good in September.

For those interested in new basket plants, winners included Petunia ’Sanguna Atomic Blue’, which brings drama to any arrangement, with its dark throated flowers with dark veins leading to a deep-mauve colour of the rounded petals.

It carried on flowering when other plants were waning, trailed well and didn’t suffer from having all the flowers at the bottom of a curtain of green growth&.

For a burst of yellow in a mixed planting basket, Bidens ’Solaire Semidouble’ didn’t disappoint, forming a dense trailing mat of fine foliage covered with hundreds of tiny, vibrant flowers that have an extra set of petals around the eye, forming a frilly collar. The plants grew well, flowered strongly all summer and were easy deadhead. &

Lovers of busy lizzies (Impatiens) whose plants succumbed to a widespread outbreak of downy mildew last summer may be better off growing alternatives such as the New Guinea-type hybrid impatiens or begonias, both of which will succeed in similar conditions, according to Which? Gardening.

Last year trialists grew several varieties of sunpatiens (a New Guinea hybrid), which all performed admirably and showed no signs of being affected.

The Sunpatiens Compact series were extremely vigorous, tolerant of both sun and shade and produced beautiful, vibrant flowers which required only a little tidying to stay looking pristine.

Of course, no summer planting scheme would be the same without the trusty lobelia – and Lobelia ’Super Star’ lived up to its name, earning the accolade of the best lobelia in the trial.

This small-flowered, bicolour variety flowered prolifically, starting in June and continuing long after other lobelias had given up entirely.

* The full report on new patio plants is in the April edition of Which? Gardening.

BEST OF THE BUNCH – EUPHORBIA

These hardy perennials are a brilliant choice for year-round interest but it isn’t the flowers that make them significant, but the eye-catching bracts which appear in late spring or early summer.

While euphorbias form a diverse group including succulents and poinsettias, it’s the hardy types you want to include in your herbaceous borders, such as E. polychroma, which has a neat dome of bright yellow bracts, and E. characias, which offer architectural value and height.

Most euphorbias prefer sun but will tolerate partial shade and grow in most soils which do not become waterlogged.

E. polychroma fills the gap between spring bedding and the first of the summer perennials, combining well with purple sage or Geum rivale.

Be warned that all euphorbias are poisonous, except the poinsettia.