Whilst our garden favourites take centre stage in our beds and borders, plants are much like people, they need companionship! Garden space fillers are a great way to add further interest to your garden, without taking away from your star performers. Buy low growing ground cover varieties such as Heuchera or Wallflowers to fill in those spaces. And who likes bare soil? Bare soil is not only unattractive but will also lose moisture in weather come wind, rain or shine, so they will also offer some protection.
Rudbeckia ‘Early Bird Gold’
Late flowering perennials will help fill in those gaps and add colour right through to the first frosts. Rudbeckia ‘Early Bird Gold’ erupts into bloom weeks earlier than other perennial varieties. Their long-lasting colour will add interest to herbaceous borders and will attract beneficial pollinating insects to your garden! You don’t want to squish those tall, flamboyant perennials together either, so why not mix it up and add some annuals such as Clematis ‘Freckles’ that will flower from December to February.
Clematis ‘Freckles’
You may be wondering what you should do for added interest when your blooms start to fade? Autumn foliage space fillers! Heuchera is our top pick. When your flowers come to an end, the foliage will provide spectacular colour and performance throughout autumn until the first sign of frosts. ‘Patchwork mix’ will add a distinctive splash of colour to the front of borders, or even brightening your winter containers. Their airy blooms attract bees and are also useful as cut flowers.
Heuchera ‘Patchwork Mix’
We’ll soon be despatching winter and spring bedding: pansies, primroses, violas, bellis and wallflowers! These are the perfect winter space fillers. They will cover bare soils right through winter, giving a flush of colour in late autumn and again in spring. Wallflower ‘Sugar Rush’ offers fragrant flower spikes in shades of cream, yellow, red and purple not only in the spring, but throughout the autumn too, blooming in just 6 weeks from an August planting! Available as garden ready plants, these customer favourites will be delivered at the right time for planting. Wallflower ‘Winter Party’ is an evergreen hybrid that is so undemanding it can even cope in the poorest of soils!
Terri works in the e-commerce marketing department assisting the busy web team. Terri manages our blog and social media pages here at Thompson & Morgan and is dedicated to providing useful advice to our gardeners. Terri is new to gardening and keen to develop her horticultural knowledge.
The Scoville scale has been the standard measure of chili heat for over a hundred years, but a rating of 750,000 or 1million+ SHU doesn’t mean much to the average gardener, other than its likely to blow your socks off! Looking to simplify things and give customers a better informed choice, Thompson & Morgan has rated all 
Our greenhouses are at their best thanks to my brilliant friend Rachel who kept an eye on things. All the plants survived our mini break and we are still picking a steady stream of 
Slugs and Snails seem to want to torment me at the moment. The number I have pulled off the glass outside is ridiculous. They seem to want to crawl up the glass and through the windows then slide down the canes. I even found a slug chewing a hole in the peppers and wood lice crawled out of a hole on the other side of the pepper. Do woodlice bore holes in them? I’m not convinced it’s them as I saw earwigs in there too. Earwigs nip pretty hard if you upset them.
There are ten greenhouses in all. I have included a photo of the Victorian entrance and a picture of most of the greenhouse and its plan. It’s worth visiting just to see the giant Water lilies in flower. I could talk for hours about our trip away, but apart from the Botanical Gardens it would have nothing to do with plants, unless I can include, whilst out walking near Arthur’s Seat, that I never knew, once a Thistle has flowered it seed heads are super soft. I was slightly alarmed when my Uncle Ronnie picked a thistle and said rub it under his chin. I dare you to try it the next time you see one.
I decided that I would grow the roses in different conditions to see how they responded. The smaller one was planted in a container, so that it had no competition from any other plants. It was planted in good quality compost, with a slow release rose fertiliser at its roots. The pot was placed in full sun, facing south east, in a sheltered spot next to the greenhouse.
As daylight starts to dwindle from the June solstice onwards, thoughts are more of growing and harvesting than of sowing. Yet the later summer months, August and September, alongside those of early autumn, are still bright enough for growing a handful of hardy crops.
