Welcome to Modern Agriculture!
This year’s first-ever autumn show reveals a glorious assortment of planting combinations to try in your own garden.
If there is one garden that has embraced the full range of autumnal colours this year it is Charlotte Harris and Hugo Bugg’s garden for show sponsors M&G.
Low-growing, sharp-leafed Amsonia illustris brings all its golden finery to the planting scheme, but you can also find Anemone ‘September Charm’ here, as well as asters, Bergenia ‘Baby Doll’ and B. ‘Wilton’. With its slender, drooping petals, Echinacea pallida is elegant among soft, feathery wisps of grass like Pennisetum ‘Cassian’.
Naomi Ferrett-Cohen pulled out all the colour stops the planting design for the Finding Our Way: An NHS Tribute Garden. Rich jewel colours abound, driving home the point that colour really can uplift the mood. Penstemons, knautia, agastache, gaura, achillea, dahlias and echinaceas all bring their bold tones to the scheme. Orange and blue are at opposite sides of the colour wheel: using contrasting colours allows each to be perceived more clearly.
Early autumn is the time of year to put fiery colours to work. In the softer light of the season they take on a gentler mood than brightly flowered plants might do in high summer, but they’re not subdued either. Consider the foliage of some of these plants, too. Here dark-leafed dahlias speak to the deep, plum tones of cannas in the background, while mustard-yellow rudbeckia and crocosmia bring up the middle ground. Burnished grasses provide a unifying thread.
Autumn is the time for fruit, too, which can be ornamental or productive, or both. Blush-toned crabapples bring their own subtle colour to Arit Anderson’s Garden of Hope. They are part of a sequence of fruiting trees: a dessert apple brings rosy interest to the arrangement, while a medlar, not often seen these days introduces a deeper, more intriguing element to the scheme. These trees bring interest year round, with spring blossom, summer leaf, autumn fruits and sculptural forms in winter. The fruits are excellent for wildlife, too.
This is the show for persicaria. Along with sanguisorbia varieties, it pops up in various gardens, not least the Trailfinders 50th Anniversary Garden by Jonathan Snow, which features plants from the foothills of the Himalayas exclusively. Try Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Alba’ for delicate wands of off-white, alongside P. ‘JS Calor’, ‘Firetail’ and the species, Persicaria orientalis.
Take a look at these winning combinations from previous shows for arrangements to try in your own garden.
If there is one Chelsea stalwart that’s enjoying a moment right now it’s geums, specifically ‘Totally Tangerine’, paler-toned ‘Mai Tai’ and now strawberry-pink ‘Pink Petticoats’. In 2018 ‘Totally Tangerine’ added its saucer-shaped orange flowers to many a combination, such as on Hay Hwang’s LG Eco-City Garden where they frothed around spires of lemon yellow lupins.
And here, with the magenta-burgundy heads of Cirsium rivulare ‘Atropurpureum’ and tapering spires of salvia in Nic Howard’s planting on the David Harber and Savills garden in 2018.
In 2019, Geum ‘Cosmopolitan’ bought bulk to Jo Thompson’s garden for Wedgwood. ‘Cosmopolitan’ is part of the Cocktails series and bears semi-ruffled flowers grading from light to dark. Look out also for Geum ‘Mai Tai’ in the same series.
Purple aquilegias take up the mantle in the Embroidered Minds Epilepsy Garden from 2018. They’re joined by a zingy golden yellow carex, the better to see their colour. Try Carex ‘Evergold’ for a similar look.
Irises always feature prominently at Chelsea. ‘Copper Classic’ is favourite for its rusty red tones and it has been used by many designers over the years. To get hold of your own Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’, shop for it in garden centres or buy plants from its original breeder, Hardy’s Cottage Garden Plants.
In the Resilience Garden designed by Sarah Eberle in 2019, irises combined with verbascum and Anthriscus sylvestris ‘Ravenswing’. Note the brilliant green at the rear which offsets the colours so well. For rust- and plum-coloured irises, look to varieties like ‘Kent Pride’, ‘Dutch Chocolate’, ‘Red Singer’ and ‘Sultan’s Palace’. Woottens of Wenhaston specialises.
Distinctive warm-toned combinations were a highlight of Jonathan Snow’s South African fynbos-inspired garden for Trailfinders in 2018. Orange and yellow-hued red hot pokers made a great partner for the bright orange flowers of Leonotis leonorus. This perennial will withstand frost but it struggles with persistent wet, so it it may need to be grown in drier, protected parts of the garden. Keep the soil of both kniphofia and leonotis free-draining.
If you enjoy cooler colours, salvias are a failsafe choice and always turn up at Chelsea, Salvia nemerosa, in particular. This pairing of deep purple salvia, pale mauve catmint, with the wispy apple green spires of tiarella and foliage of euphorbias, made for a calm and restful planting scheme on Matt Keightley’s Feel Good garden for the RHS in 2018.
Purest blue flax flowers as well as borage and hardy geraniums bring a cool note to the planting in Sarah Eberle’s 2019 Resilience Garden.
The real show-stopper in 2019 was Andy Sturgeon’s show-winning garden for M&G Investments. It demonstrated how effective a background can be at highlighting colours. We may not wish for a garden like this in our homes, but the arrangement illustrates how a colour becomes more intense when it is placed against a contrast. So, for brilliant yellows, grow them with blue, or for bright reds and oranges, grow them with purple.
