I am enjoying all the late flowering plants in my garden at the moment. The last blooms of autumn are so special – I feel like I want to savour them as I know that any day a frost or stormy weather will bring their season to an end.

Michaelmas daisy with hoverfly.

Many of these flowers are also important food plants for insects like butterflies and hoverflies who feast on their nectar while they can. This autumn there has been an abundance of Red Admiral butterflies locally but I’ve not spotted one Peacock, usually a fairly common late visitor. The news is that there is a decline in many species of native butterflies and I fear that the beautiful Peacock might be among them.

Red Admiral rests on hydrangea.

My reliable Michaelmas daisies are flowering away and I have picked a vase full to enjoy inside while it rains outside. Some types are fading but others are yet to come into bloom. With careful selection, it is possible to enjoy their flowers from July until November. But then again, I’m a big fan of daisies.

In a dash to the greenhouse to pick the last few tomatoes, I am pulled up short by the fantastic perfume that hits me as I open the door. Another bloom has opened on my Hedychium gardnerianum, the Kahili ginger. This spectacular plant brings an exotic touch to the garden in late summer with its lush, leafy stems topped with spikes of sweetly scented yellow flowers, each with protruding red stamens. This is a plant I overwinter in the green house, just letting it die down and ignoring it until I see buds appearing in the spring. It’s a vigorous thing, so I will split it and pot up sections of tuber in fresh compost at that point. I usually keep a pot on the patio and another in the greenhouse so that its flowering season can be extended.

Fuchsia fulgens (left), Hedychium (right).

Before I head back to the kitchen, I grab a couple of chilli’s off my ‘Apache’ plant and check on my young geranium plants taken as cuttings and potted up individually a few weeks ago. With damp autumn conditions, I watch out for any mouldy leaves that need to be removed quickly. Botrytis spreads where there is a lack of air movement and I need to keep my plants dry and give them good ventilation. I also have some young fuchsia plants taken from cuttings that I’ll treat the same way.

They may not be fashionable, but I like fuchsias. Maybe not the big, blowsy types, but tall, elegant hardy plants such as ‘Hawkshead’ or ‘Lady Bacon’ and the more tender Triphylla types like ‘Thalia’ or Fuchsia fulgens. I probably have too many plants of the latter, but I love their long, tubular flowers in soft red/orange tipped in green.

Salvia-corrugata.

I also like my salvias! Although I have several in the garden border, I keep a few tender types for late pot display. Salvia confertiflora has been flowering for a couple of months with its long, tapering flower stalks with tiny brick red flowers against a fuzzy crimson stem. Yes, fuzzy! Several salvias are quite tactile, although with this one you might not enjoy the smell of its foliage. The original plant was purchased at Trebah in Cornwall when our sons were young and they had to endure the journey home with the smell in the car. The worst plant in the garden they always reckoned, but I still love it, taking cuttings each year to keep it going. Likewise Salvia leucantha, another soft, furry individual with grey foliage and lavender flowers. Last to flower will be Salvia corrugata with its distinctive, shiny crinkled leaves that have a rusty felted texture below and deep blue flowers. All tender plants and a complete indulgence.

Salvia confertiflora (left), salvia leucantha (right).

These are exotic blooms compared with my love of daisies. But I’ll end with a daisy that always comes as a surprise so late in the day. Leucanthemella serotina is a tall, hardy perennial for the back of a border – a classic daisy with white petals surrounding a yellow disc. It can wander a bit, but I forgive it that annoying tendency as it is such a cheery plant as the days grow shorter.

As I head to the allotment to pick some dahlias, kicking through piles of leaves as I walk, I realise it’s time to celebrate the autumn colours that leaves, hips and berries give us and say goodbye to summer flowers for this year.

Leucanthemella serotina.