Plugging the May Gap

In London the May Gap comes early. For gardeners the May Gap is the quiet time when the garden becomes less colourful. The spring bulbs and other spring flowers go over, but the summer-flowering perennials have not got into their stride. 

 For me, having some flowers at this time of year was never a problem. The difficulty was rather the colour of those flowers. I bought a superb allium (ornamental onion) from Cotswold Garden Flowers called Allium 'Globemaster'. From that single plant I now have sixty or more. The flower heads are a pleasant purple. From the same source I also purchased Gladiolus Byzantinus which is magenta. This is another wonderful plant which proved prolific. These two came to dominate the "May Gap". But the unrelieved combination of mauve-purple and magenta wasn't giving me the "hot colours" I craved. Quite the reverse; the display looked cold!

So I needed to add some plants which would warm up the scene and give me boldness and brilliance in terms of warmer hues. 

 My first solution was foliage. I made an impulse purchase of a cream variegated sedum (iceplant) from the local garden centre.  Curiously the cream leaves had a substantial effect on "warming up" the planting as a whole. I now also have a large number of grasses and shrubs providing bright yellow, yellow-green and apple-green, as well as a Euphorbia with massive yellow-green flowers. 

Then I discovered some 21st-century varieties of geum which had taken the plant world by storm.  Geums are plants which flower during the May Gap in orange, red and yellow on long wands. The new strains,  "Totally Tangerine" and "Scarlet Tempest", are prolific and long-flowering. "Totally Tangerine" is light orange and "Scarlet Tempest" orange-red. I love them both.  This year I am trying "Fireball" which boasts dramatically large orange blooms. Geums have done much to give my garden late-spring hot colour.

Geum "Scarlet Tempest" cut for the vase in late April

 

I'd also recommend polyanthus.  I planted 40 Polyanthus "Crescendo Yellow" having raised them as plugs from Brookside Nursery.  These have been a phenomenal source of springtime yellow, outlasting daffodils and proving reliably perennial.  Other strains of polyanthus have not had the same staying power, not even the orange strain from the Crescendo clan. An advantage of polyanthus (the ones with the tall flowerheads) over primroses is that slugs and snails are relatively uninterested in them; I am forever grateful to an old lady customer in a garden centre for volunteering this tip. 

I have also had success with winter pansies in containers and would recommend Pansy "Matrix Orange" and its yellow counterpart. Although they are annuals (again, I raise them from plugs) they are worth the faff: they amaze me by flowering for months and months. Some alstroemeria can be relied upon to flower early if suitably sited; I get early flowers from an orange alstroe which insists on growing through a deciduous shrub; the extra warmth means that it is far taller than my other alstroes in late spring.

Finally, some roses (in London at least) come in the May Gap. Mine are orange and red climbers.  Suitably obliged to grow low, they can provide further warmth to the late spring display.

Orange blooms to the back and front relieve the purple of Allium "Globemaster"