Where did fair Helen of Troy end up after launching and losing the Trojan war? Did she really go home and try to restart life with her aggrieved husband, Menelaus? Did she go west to hibernate in Hollywood? The dramatist Euripides wrote a play named after her in which she went to Egypt and never reached Troy at all. In translation she has been spending part of the summer at the Globe Theatre in London, acting out Euripides’s version. The beauty of a myth is that there is never a definitive version. In my view Helen has been spending recent weeks at her golden best in my garden.

I owe her presence to a packet of seeds. Three years ago I bought, on spec, a packet of hardy annual seeds called Inula Helen of Troy. The accompanying colour picture looks rather brassy but there is no way that a gardener-cum-classicist could pass up such a chance. I could grow my own Helen and see what she might have looked like. She turns out to be about 1ft high and covers herself in scores of yellow daisy-like flowers in a shade of old gold.

She was such a success with me last year that I saved her seed and grew too much of her this year. To use up the seedlings I then stuck them in the edges of plantings in pots around the house. They look wonderfully cheerful in a colour that no book would recommend. Other surplus Helens went in with a mixture of bedded zinnias and some dahlias in a bed where I might have tried to grow carrots. Golden-headed Helen is far better value than a stumpy carrot. She carries so many flowers that it takes patience to dead-head her and ensure continuity. I tell myself I am giving Helen a haircut and I keep her flowering until October. Typically, her British seed-suppliers have now dropped her from their list.

Helenium Mardi Gras

Although she is botanically an inula, I class her in my mind with her namesakes, the heleniums, a family that does so much for gardens from mid-July until autumn. They span every height you could want and they last for years with minimal attention. They became unpopular when gardeners began to be wary of yellow flowers, especially yellows in late summer. Fashion has now turned and the revival of hot summer colours has brought heleniums back into the reckoning. They add shades of burnt orange and even mahogany-red, best found in the excellent old Moerheim Beauty, a favourite because prompt dead-heading makes it flower twice in a summer. Unlike Helen of Troy, these forms are all true perennials that last from year to year and can be split into ever more plants each spring. I began with two little plants of the best variety in the family, the unstoppable Sahin’s Early Flowerer. I now have dozens, finding the form to be the toughest and most prolific, with flowers of orange-yellow marked with yellow throughout the summer from July until autumn. If you are reviving an old border, Sahin’s Early Flowerer is now a first choice for impact and easy living. It is a great arrival in garden centres of the past few years.

In Homer’s Odyssey, the name of Helenium turns up in Sparta, putting drugs in her male visitors’ wine. One of her additions is so strong, we are told, that it could block anyone’s tears, even if their mother or father happened to have died. What was the old charmer’s secret? Homer never saw Sahin’s Early Flowerer and probably he had no single everyday plant in mind. Inevitably, helenium began to be cited by inquisitive critics as Helen’s natural remedy but even the wilder heleniums are not known as tearstoppers if chewed or crushed. Had Helen picked up an illicit packet while visiting narcotic Egypt? The question is still open but, meanwhile, I am happy to give her heleniums the benefit of the doubt.

In Europe, their popularity has not been interrupted by prejudice. Even the yellows are prized and I have learnt from French and German examples to reinstate the ones that used to be reviled. My success of the moment is the 5ft-tall Helenium Riverton Beauty, whose fresh yellow flowers have contrasting brown centres. The plants need staking discreetly but they are first class at this valuable height in a mixed border. Riverton Gem is equally robust but the flowers are a burnt red-orange. Do not be shy of other clear yellows of the past, the tall Butterpat and 3ft-high Wyndley. They are certainly not drugs on the market.

As September descends on us, I look to German selections to prolong the helenium season and accompany the earlier forms’ second flush of flower. At a medium height, Indianersommer is a striking brick red and Septemberfuchs a red-russet. By now Moerheim Beauty is back in flower, with new buds in the joints of its main stems, and the charming Ruby Tuesday is still showing small dark red flowers at a height fit for the border’s front row. While the British were mumbling about “strong yellow”, German and American nurseries were cheerfully selecting ever better forms in all shapes and sizes. There are plenty with which we need to catch up.

Do they prefer particular soils and situations? In very hot sun the mahogany and deep reds lose their depth of colour and turn a faded brown. Nothing seems to stop Sahin’s fine variety but the others are even better on soils that are not excessively dry all summer. They will grow anywhere but show their best where they are not scorched. Nothing seems to kill them.

As our Horse Chestnut trees have gone brown-leaved from a plague of immigrant insects, I am cheered by flowers that range healthily towards red-brown as a matter of course. Heleniums are back in popularity, matched by the annual-flowered Helen, which is all over my garden and really ought to be promoted again by our seedsmen. You begin to see what those ancient Greeks might have been fighting about for so long. Grow Helen’s perennial relations and enjoy the peaceful beauty of her namesakes.