Hints and tips:
...In his late paintings, Van Gogh painted a vase of ranunculus and anemones and another of gladioli with double-flowered China asters. On my soil those annual asters are prone to mildew....
...Plant Aster frikartii Mönch because it flowers so well from July into autumn and, like catmint, spreads so that you can divide it into many more after one year....
...I have it near a fine pale sky-blue aster with little flowers, Hon Vicary Gibbs, which is sold, like all the best asters, by Old Court Nurseries, near Malvern, who will send young plants out next May if...
...One would be for the autumn asters, as we still know them despite their botanical dispersion into families from eurybia to symphyotrichum....
...I went hoping to admire the long bed of blue-flowered daisies, Aster x frikartii, which ran under the wall down to the moat....
...Twelve years ago, when an aster was still an aster, I bought a plant of a tall one, Aster Chieftain, from the national collection of Michaelmas daisies in Worcestershire....
...Aster frikartii x Monch is an assured winner, lavender blue, long flowering and flopping prettily from July onwards. Tip number six? Get down on your hands and knees and hand-weed with a good trowel....
...Sedums, asters, irises, phloxes, hardy geraniums and heleniums are favourite choices for borders, each of which will split easily if cut through by a sharp spade, preferably on a fine day between now and...
...However, Nature had a hard card up her sleeve: days of heavy rain in late September and October showed how vulnerable the flowers on many asters are to intense wet. They closed up and turned brown....
...This very weekend, the naturalist Gilbert White, to whom I will return in another column, was picking flowers in that year off an aster with “fine, showy purple flowers” and was commenting on the “warm wet...
...I love Michaelmas daisies but the Great Autumn Show taught me there is even more to late September than “a” for aster, before the botanists allotted asters to many different Latin names....
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...Asters are now a particular nightmare....
...I admired the interwoven groupings, in which tufty flowered Sanguisorba Red Buttons runs back into cosmos daisies, a good cluster of peonies and to one side, an aster, now renamed Kalimeris mongolica....
...A summer winner is a small-flowered white daisy, listed as Erigeron (or Aster) annuus....
...If travel becomes open again, I imagine riding through Mongolia among the local potentillas and asters....
...Those are three types of low-growing, basically, Aster, which anyone watching can have that within two years....
...The family of asters was promptly afflicted with a scientific name-change. The book would now have to be called Growing Eurybias, Asters, Symphyotrichums and a Doellingeria....
...Some 125m years ago, at the time when human ancestors begin, I think, to be traceable there were asters and their relations....
...I now realise I began with the wrong asters. I have since found two excellent ones, but the botanists then changed the family’s names....
...Dave Goulson, The Garden Jungle (Jonathan Cape, £16.99) Robin Lane Fox will speak at the FT Weekend Festival, September 7 at Kenwood House, London....
...My alternative would be heavier on asters and long-flowering dianthus but it would not necessarily be better....
...All types of aster had ridden the drought without loss and excelled themselves in late autumn....
...And the menthol-leaved Geranium tomentosum is getting so big for its pot I have dug it into a border beside asters, tree peonies, lily of the valley and peonies....
...One was the proliferation of small-flowered blue asters in my borders, running wild after several years. The other was the colchicum crisis....
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