Bridgemere Show Gardens September

We usually like to speculate the changes that we might notice as we drive towards Bridgemere Garden Centre’s Show Gardens, but after the strange weather we have endured in recent months we really couldn’t make any guesses. We wanted to see which plants were recovering after the summer drought and expected to find some that had succombed.

As usual we stopped at the Cottage Garden first, which looked as if it had started recovering well. Verbena bonariensis and eupatorium were giving plenty of colour and colour also came from the blushed apples that had fallen to the ground.

The Dahlias in the Cottage Garden looked as if we had never experienced a drought this summer, they glowed richly as they did throughout the gardens.

Deep red with green foliage Yellow with deep purple foliage

Alongside dahlias, asters are at their best at this time of the year so we looked out for them throughout the garden with other autumn flowering perennials.

Of course, the most obvious sign of autumn was the change in colour of tree and shrub foliage, the appearance of yellows, oranges and reds on leaves.

Another sign of this season is noticing berries, fruits, nuts and seeds being produced by trees and shrubs. There were plenty of plants busy loading their branches with these colourful additions.

We noticed among the autumnal features dominating the garden there were interesting plants with coloured foliage.

Even at this time of year flowering shrubs are adding extra colour to the gardens. So I will finish off this report of our September visit to the show gardens at Bridgemere with these three photos of shrubs in flower.