HAPPY EVER AFTER

Fill your garden with deciduous perennials and you'll have spring, summer and autumn shows year after year!

1 GREAT BALLS OF BLUE

The bold, ornamental steel-blue globe thistle (Echinops 'Veitch's Blue') keeps reblooming from December to early autumn, then you can showcase them through winter as a dried flower.

2 BUNCH YOUR BEAUTIES

From top to bottom, mix textures and colours to create a quiet clamour, from Eupatorium 'Flore Plena' with its caps of abundant pink or purple flowers to Caryopteris 'Heavenly Blue', Helenium 'Crimson Beauty' and big, fluffy lamb's ears (Stachys 'Big Ears').

3 THE SOFT BUTTER YELLOW FLOWERS of Jerusalem sage (Phlomis russeliana) have faded, but their seed heads look striking against the noble, silver-leafed dusty miller.

4 A MUST FOR ANY AUTUMN GARDEN is Sedum 'Autumn Joy'.

5 YOU'LL GET MONTHS AND MONTHS of summer-autumn happiness with Rudbeckia 'Goldsturm'.

6 STUNNING FROM GO TO WHOA, the flowers of Achillea 'Antique Parchment' start off salmony, fade to apricot and finish looking like a sandy parchment.

7 FEATHER FASHION PASSION

Don't forget to put in ornamental grasses. Reed feather grass (Calamagrostis Karl Foerster) is a tall, upright grass that adds strong vertical lines to your garden and enhances your lower-growing flowering shrubs.

8 RED-HOT PASSION takes you to extraordinary places, especially in late summer with Crocosmia 'Hellfire'!