A view of the cosmos

For the last couple of years I've grown cosmos 'Candy Stripe'. Its a fabulously tall and floriferous variety with white flowers edged in pink that reliably flowers right into November, until the frosts. Its a plant that is great to fill in a space and keep the colour going. This year I decided to try a few different cosmos varieties and here is a short commentary on how they got on.

Xanthos - is a beautiful pale yellow with a profusion of quite small flowers. It just gets to around a foot and a half tall. The colour works well with the blue/purple of Salvia transylvanica, and Monarda didyma 'red shades'. I loved it at the front of the border. The one drawback with this variety is the difficulty in deadheading. On most of the flowers there is hardly any stalk making it incredibly awkward to deadhead - you really need patience and a tiny pair of scissors/snips. Next year I plan to swap Xanthos for the variety 'Lemonade' which is a similar yellow but slightly larger plant and decent length of stalk.

Rubenza - is the most luscious dark red flower on the absolute weediest of plant! Its not a particularly tall variety, but I was quite surprised that even with pinching out early on the plants never really came to much. The ones in containers in the back courtyard seemed to make a bit more of a show, perhaps they appreciated the warmer environment, but still nothing like the amount of flowers that you get with Candy Stripe. For next year, with a similar colour I'll be looking to grow 'Dazzler' instead.

Seashells - has a more interesting shape of petal again in pink and white like Candy Stripe. It may have been the very wet summer but these plants put on a lot of growth but not very many flowers and the one I had left after giving most of the plants to my mum, ended up flat on the ground after a gale, so I didn't get to test how far into autumn it would go.

Brights - tried again and had none germinate this year. I have heard from a friend that she always germinates her cosmos on kitchen roll, so I will definitely be giving that a go next year.