I was intending to write about dahlias this week. Not that we grow many dahlias but I see friends posting many photos of huge, specimen blooms in a range of colours and complex forms. I was going to plead the case for the simplicity of single and semi double blooms in a garden setting and argue that those big novelty blooms are perhaps better grown in a row in the cutting garden than in mixed plantings in flower beds. I like the light, airiness of the simpler forms in the garden.

But then I got distracted by the colour orange because this year, my favourite dahlias are the orange ones and I have not been greatly enamoured of that colour since I was a child when I desperately wanted an orange bedspread. My dear mother always did her very best to meet our requests but we were only ever a step or two above the poverty line so it was always a case of near enough has to be good enough. She found some velvet being remaindered but it was more red than orange so she made the bedspread and assured me it was *tangerine*. It may have been tangerine-ish but it wasn’t the pure orange I had dreamed of. I remember swallowing my disappointment to express appreciation, knowing she had done the best she could.  

I turned my eyes to orange flowers in the garden and was surprised when I picked flowers from a dozen different plants. The orange – and yellow – cosmos we planted in the rockery for late summer and autumn colour are looking particularly cheerful and they started flowering within two weeks of my planting out tiny seedlings a few centimetres high. And this week, it is the heleniums that are the stars of the twin borders.

Every year, I forget whether these are helenium, helianthus or helianthemum and I have to google them to refresh my memory. Maybe I could call them sneezeweeds instead. That is the common name conferred upon them when, in times gone by, the dried leaves were used in snuff to encourage sneezing in order to rid the body of evil spirits. Fellow sufferers of hayfever, take heart. We just didn’t know that we were expelling the bad spirits from our bodies without having to resort to snuff. That said, I am not aware of the helenium flowers making my hay fever worse.

The Castanospermum australe is having a particularly good season. The tree is well over ten metres tall now and we usually only see the flowers from a distance right at the top. This year, we seem to have more growing beneath the foliage as well so they are only about eight metres up. Being native to the more tropical parts of Australia, it may be enjoying the milder winters and warmer summers we are now experiencing.  

When it comes to orange as a colour in the garden, a little can go a long way. It is a very strong colour in its pure shades. Mark’s advice is to include plenty of other plants from the other side of the colour wheel – so in the blue and purple shades, although green also acts as a visual foil. Personally, I am not so keen visually on a whole lot of orange combined with either red or yellow and pastel pink is problematic.

I would have said I never wear orange, but that changed as of yesterday when this orange cardigan arrived. In self defence, I tell you that it is just for summer gardening, 100% cotton, has the all-important pockets and was reduced from $100 to $25. I was just a little alarmed by the colour. I may have thought of it more as burnt orange when I ordered it but it is Very Orange. At least I will not be difficult to find in the garden. When I come to think of it, it is probably the very shade eleven-or-twelve-year-old me had envisaged for my bedspread.

My thoughts are with northerners this weekend, particularly in Auckland, Coromandel and Northland, who must feel as though they have the sword of Damocles poised above them as they await the arrival of Cyclone Gabrielle. It is one week off a year since we learned what cyclonic winds can do when we took a direct hit from Cyclone Dovi. That was bad enough and we didn’t get the torrential rain that is predicted with Gabrielle, falling on land that is already saturated and further threatening infrastructure already badly damaged by the recent extreme weather and flooding in those areas. May you stay safe. We will breathe a sigh of relief if the dire predictions do not come to pass for you in the next few days.