Summer garden ideas: Add colour, perfume with flowers in December

Summer brings the opportunity to indulge in a dazzling display of bright tones, with a host of flowers ready to plant.

ALL good things come to end and on Saturday we’ll say goodbye to the dream season that is spring.

With Christmas looming, many gardeners shut up shop in preparation for a long, hot summer.

It’s a pity, because there is a vast number of rewards still to be claimed.

It’s the perfect time to brighten up gardens with a blaze of summer colours, and to add intrigue with some of the most alluring perfumes imaginable.

I say it every year, but if it’s eye-catching colour at the right price you’re after, look no further than the leader items at the entrance to garden centres and those giant green box stores.

Here, you generally find lots of bloomers pots, things like petunias, cosmos, marigolds and zinnias, that bloom all summer and many, if treated well, will continue into autumn.

For me, there’s one plant that symbolises the start of summer and the approach of Christmas –— the hydrangea.

Sure, it’s a bit of a grandma’s plant, but it’s just so showy.

A favourite of mine is Hydrangea “Sundae Fraise”, with its masses of white blooms throughout summer and autumn.

A French award-winner, its flowers start off green before progressing through white and then various tones of pink.

Relatively hardy for a hydrangea, it has quite moderate water needs.

Of course, Christmas is not Christmas without one or two common macrophylla hydrangeas — whether pink, blue or white — blooming their beautiful heads off.

Showpieces: Hydrangeas come in a variety of colours, will thrive in a shady spot and bloom into autumn. Picture: Fawcett Media

Give these blousy beguilers a basically shady spot with morning sun and reasonable soil and they shine, or buy a couple for a festive season display before planting them out in autumn.

Of course, Victorian summers inevitably throw up some days of soaring temperatures and hot, drying northerlies so it pays to keep your cool.

Apart from an icy drink, one of the best ways is surrounding yourself with an array of blue flowering plants.

It’s purely mental, but it’s amazing how plants such as the sky-blue flowering plumbago can create a cooling mood.

Plumbago might sound like a disease, yet this shrubby perennial gets its name from the Latin word for lead, because its blue flowers reminded botanists of the colour of the pliable metal.

Plant a plumbago now and it will flower through to March, and every summer after.

Similar too is the butterfly bush (Buddleia) with its nectar-filled purple, white or near carmine blooms.

There are heaps of varieties and most are not the least demanding, adapting to a variety of soil types and needing little more than a good hard haircut after flowering.

Summer also brings some of the most tantalising perfumes of the garden year.

If you don’t have any already, consider a few flowering pots of murrayas (the scent is exquisite of a summer’s evening), gardenias and twining star jasmine (Trachelospermum jasminoides).

For me, summer is also gin and tonic weather, so if you don’t have a couple of potted lemon trees, appropriately positioned near an entrance or entertaining area where their fresh citrus scent can be fully appreciated, you are missing out badly.

There’s something beautifully indulgent about plucking a lemon from a tree and dropping a cut slice in a summer drink.

Or consider a Tahitian lime. A few leaves are magic in a salad, and a squeeze of juice in that gin and tonic works a treat.

Consider too a few summer pots of lavender. There are about 47 species of this plant with new cultivars appearing annually, so the only problem is choosing a favourite.

Also about are liliums.

Buy them potted and flowering now.

A few traditional white Christmas lilies never go astray.

You might also get hold of a potted lilly pilly for use as a true blue Aussie Christmas tree.

Ah yes, come on summer, and pass me that G&T.

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