Down among the daisies

3:26pm Friday 11th July 2008

If there is one plant designed to please the insects and the bees it is the traditional daisy with its dense middle of tiny flowers surrounded by showy ray petals. The hundreds of tiny flowers packed into the central disc produce nectar over a period of many days or weeks.

As a result many larger daisies last in the garden for long periods and they sustain bees, butterflies and hoverflies. Not surprisingly they are border staples.

The name daisy is said to be a corruption of day's eye' and all daisies seem to prefer light, open sunny positions where they can open their eyes. The early-flowering ones often have silver leaves indicating their need for sun and good drainage. The best early daisies are varieties of anthemis and they produce white or yellow flowers held above ferny foliage. The earliest is the white sprawling white Anthemis punctata subsp. cupaniana and this looks best tumbling over a low wall.

Probably the best mid-yellow, upright anthemis is still an old variety called A. tinctoria E.C. Buxton'. This will flower from June until August and produce tasteful yellow flowers and dark-green leaves. Sauce Hollandaise' has smaller cream-yellow daisies and Beauty of Grallagh' has egg-yolk yellow daisies.

There is an excellent cupaniana' hybrid called Susanna Mitchell' which flowers for me from May until November. It has a slightly sprawling habit but sends out hundreds of lemon-yellow daisies over months. Pallid lemon is particularly good with purples. I use Allium Purple Sensation' and Spanish lavender (Lavandula pedunculata subsp. pedunculata) early in the season and then dark penstemons later on. All anthemis need good drainage and regular propagation. Pull pieces away from the base in early summer and they should already have roots at the base, so the process of taking Irishman's cuttings' is easy.

Some daisies have compressed flowers without ray petals and they don't look like members of the daisy family. They include achilleas, santolinas and artemisia. Achillea flowers are very tiny and can sustain small hoverflies with small mouths when they first flower. After a week or so the nectar dries up although achillea flowers carry on looking good and they dry well.

There are hundreds to chose from and among my personal favourites are the acid-yellow Moonshine' bred by the late, great Alan Bloom of Bressingham. This is the longest flowering achillea I know and in warm, dry summers it will flower from May until October. However Moonshine' does get woodier than most and therefore needs to be propagated every third year to remain vigorous. Pull pieces away from the base and plunge into horticultural sand and then pot up in a 50% compost and grit mixture.

The lemon-yellow Martina' has frilly flowers and Red Velvet' is a deep-red that doesn't fade. Oranges and terracottas are also useful and the best of the terracotta' bunch is Walther Funcke'. It doesn't fade and it persists through winter. These achilleas are good with the optic-filament grass Stipa tenuissima.

But it's the second half of summer that sees an explosion of daisy power and many come in warm yellows and oranges. Heleniums have velvet-brown middles and, if dead headed, they can produce weeks of flower in moisture retentive soil. The older varieties flag on drier soils. But there is a more drought-tolerant, earlier flowering hybrid called Sahin's Early Flowerer' which thrived in my dry Hook Norton garden. It's all so flourishing in my damper new garden too.

The wonderful thing about Sahin's Early Flowerer' is the way it shimmers in the border for every single flower is slightly different. It must have some sort of jumping gene. Bob Brown of Cotswold Garden Flowers spotted it on Sahin's trial ground in The Netherlands, acquired it, bulked it up and popularised it. Thank you Bob!

The same brown and yellow colour scheme occurs in rudbeckias and these days my annual' rudbeckias ( forms of R. hirta) are coming through our milder winters despite being chopped back in late winter. My favourite is Indian Summer' ( from Suttons). The daisies are very flat and clean and they can measure six inches across. But despite that they are weather resistant and highly attractive to those darty butterflies - the painted ladies.

Rudbeckias are particularly good at lighting up August and there are excellent perennial forms that bear lots of smaller daisies on straight stems. The best is Rudbeckia fulgida var. deamii. These are neat golden yellow daisies with deep-brown middles and many refer to them as black-eyed Susans. They mix well with sunny-hued crocosmias, dahlias and red hot pokers.

If a cooler lemon is required, to use with purples or cool reds and pinks, opt for lemon-yellow leucanthemums ( Shasta daisies) like Sonnenschein' or Goldrausch'. I have done well with both. But Goldrausch, which has fringed flowers, is thought to be far better. For height use the clump-forming Helianthus Lemon Queen'. This is a show-stopping plant in the garden and, unlike so many tall daisies, it does not stray from its clump. Some are nightmares in the making.

The perfect antidote to all that yellow is the pink or mauve aster which has had a new lease of life as part of prairie planting schemes. Echinaceas are also burgeoning due to prairie planting schemes and there are lots of new stunners on offer. This daisy will persist into winter as a black cone on a stiff stem.

It's good to see the aster back in vogue. It fell from favour in the 1970s because it was impossible to get it to flower in pots. They could have been lost to cultivation but many were rescued by Paul Picton who is a second generation nurseryman working on the Ballard site at Colwall near Malvern. Ernest Ballard was the main breeder of asters, or Michaelmas daisies, in Britain. If you get a mellow September day and decide on a plant-hunting trip head to the display garden and nursery for a floral autumn extravaganza with dancing butterflies as an added extra. ( tel 01684 540416).

You can also see asters in abundance at Waterperry Gardens near Wheatley and buy very well-raised plants. Basically there are two types of American aster - the New England aster (Aster novae- angliae) and the New York aster (Aster novi-belgii). Both need moist soil to perform well. But English asters perform better than New York asters almost to a man. And they are less prone to mildew - a water stress disease. Good performers include the bright-pink Aster novae-angliae Andenken an Alma Potschke' and the pale-pink Harrington's Pink'. If you want to attract the butterflies Barr's Pink' is excellent.

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