pretty in pink

The Cosmos are doing very well in pots.  It's the first time I've got them to the stage of actual flowering pots on the patio.  I've sown seed a couple of times before, then lost the plants along the way.  They germinate very quickly, and rapidly become horribly straggly, so I gave up with one lot, while my second attempt was stymied by the outbreak of root aphid in the greenhouse.  The current plants were pretty lanky by the time I got round to making the pots up and moving them outside, and as I tied their spindly stems into bamboo canes I had some doubts whether they would ever come to any good or if I was simply wasting a bag of compost.

But once they were out in the sun they thickened out beautifully, and my best guess of three or four plants to a pot around the 33 centimetre mark proved about right.  They are singles, in white and mixed shades of pink from pale to deep cherry, and I am very pleased with them.  The foliage is good, with finely divided, airy leaves in a fresh shade of green.  I've been dead heading them every couple of days, and they are still producing fresh buds enthusiastically.

I found them some friends in the shape of some pink dahlias, that by happy coincidence exactly match the middle pink shade of the Cosmos.  My collection of dahlias in pots grew up randomly, a mixture of varieties I'd bought because I liked them in the catalogue, a couple of impulse purchases from the plant centre, and some singles I grew from seed and originally had planted out in the garden before discovering the spot I'd chosen was too dry and salvaging the survivors.  There was no colour scheme, and when they were all stood outside the conservatory for the summer the effect was bright but bitty.

This spring I decided to stick to a theme of hot colours, vivid pinks, purples, orange with a hint of pink and pink with overtones of orange.  I bought a few new tubers from the Sarah Raven catalogue to get me started, and then since most of the existing pots weren't labelled I had to wait until the first flower opened on each, to see if it would go with the new look.  Most did, testament to the fact that one of the colours I like is dark red, but there were a couple of a shell pink cactus variety that absolutely didn't fit the chosen scheme.  Lo and behold, I never planned it that way but they were a perfect match for the Cosmos, and the double flowers of the dahlias set off the simple open daisy shape of the Cosmos.

Even the hot scheme looked better after a bit of final rearranging.  The pictures on Sarah Raven's website made all of her rich jewel colours look as thought they went together fantastically, but in the cold light of day and without the magic of a professional garden photographer I didn't think the magenta cactus and the jumbled yellow and orange semi double did a lot for each other.  The same collection of plants looked vastly better to my eye once I'd sorted them into a colour gradient, magenta and true purple at one end, the strongest oranges at the other, with the pinks tending to orange in the middle, and dark red dotted all the way along, because it goes with everything and I had so many of them.

Despite admiring mixed pots at grand gardens like Powis Castle, I much prefer doing my own pots in single varieties, apart from the alpines, and they throw up the problem of some plants infiltrating the entire pot while others languish.  It is much easier to water a single variety pot than one in which some occupants are always thirsty while others threaten to rot from over watering, while if things turn out to be taller or shorter than you were expecting, or you didn't realise they'd be that colour, you can move the pot to a better place.  Or bin it.