This week... Marguerites

Plant marguerites for lots of daisy-like flowers during summer in a range of colours

- GRAHAM RICE

MARGUERITES are small, short-lived, frost-tender shrubs with masses of daisy-like flowers in summer and sometimes for longer.

The plants are more or less evenly rounded in shape, the new growth soon becoming woody and developing into a repeatedly branched evergreen shrub. The irregularly divided leaves vary from dark green to silvery grey, sometimes split into slender divisions. The flowers can be single, like daisies, crested or anemone-centred, with a crown of short petals in the centre of each flower, or double with a mass of petals.

Various flower forms

The flowers come in reds, yellows and pinks, plus white, in their various flower forms. Some of the prettiest varieties have flowers with rings of colour around the golden eye while in others the flowers change colour as they mature or as the temperature rises and falls.

In areas with high summer temperatures flowering may tail off in the hottest weeks and then flowering may improve again after temperatures have passed their summer peak.

Planting marguerites