Gardeners are not good at long absences. After four days away from home the anxiety dreams begin: images of rabbits in the seed-beds, storms in the shrubbery and water taps that have suddenly started to run all day. I said goodbye to my dahlias in early September and dreaded returning to a badgers’ picnic in early October. In fact the garden hasn’t looked so good all year.

The moral is not that we should take a month abroad and leave nature to her work. Rather, it is that late autumn is a heavenly month for serious gardeners and has a range nowadays that we can all exploit. More good varieties of autumn plants are on sale and the frequent sunny endings to the growing season are in their favour. In younger days I was chilled by Vita Sackville-West’s comparison between our own and our gardens’ lifespan. Spring, she thought, was youth, early summer was our season of maturity and July was the beginning of middle age. As for autumn, the comparisons, she felt, were too grim to draw. Her garden at Sissinghurst had a fine conclusion to its year in a bold border of late flowering blue asters and shocking pink nerines. Nonetheless she wrote of a sort of shudder when the year passed August.

My October is a haze of heavenly daisies, plenty of flowers on deadheaded annuals, branches of white blossom on the newish heptacodium, arching lespedezas all over the edges of borders, the final flurry from properly fed dahlias, scarlet schizostylis in big gaps left in paving stones and blazing red from that godsend to ageing rockeries, zauschneria from California. After two years without protection the tall Salvia Involucrata (pictured above) is in its element, thrusting its vivid magenta-purple flowers horizontally like tubes of a strong 1950s lipstick.

It does not seem to matter too much that in Britain the autumn days have been very dry, saved only by increasing dews at night. With so many flowers around, it is less sad that the horse chestnuts have turned prematurely brown from their infestation of foreign insects and that many of their companion trees are turning colour early and shutting up in the face of a mini-drought. I have had to give up autumn crocuses now that resident badgers have scented them out and uprooted them but here too the damage is not irreparable. I have gone over to growing the big colchicums, which marauders leave alone. In spring these colchicums throw up their glossy green leaves but they are not nearly as ugly as the older books on bulbs used to say. They have the added advantage of being poisonous to cattle and no doubt to unwary badgers too.

I am very pleased with the heptacodium and want to say more about it as it is now very widely on sale. It is a hardy shrub that seems to grow on any soil, with or without lime or heavy clay. I bought one and put it in the increasing shade of a walnut tree, which it increasingly disliked, but now that the walnut tree has been felled it is showing what it can do. It is about 6ft tall already and will probably reach 10. It is about 4ft wide with more spread to come and the branches are set with slightly shiny leaves that hang downwards, perhaps especially so on my dry soil. After the buddleias’ main show has finished it starts to flower freely in September, opening small white blooms whose overall impact is significant. There are pinkish bracts beside them and when the flowers fall the little fruits are also pretty. Most of all I like heptacodium because it attracts no diseases or predatory insects. Even the squirrels do not bother with it. It is emerging as a winner among the recent plant-collections in China.

Aster Novae Angliae

From an older world the winners are the asters, or Michaelmas Daisies. This year is superb for the best of them as their flowers open so well in sunshine. Even the vivid cherry-red Aster Alma Potschke has shown its best face. In most years, hundreds of buds never open properly on this bright plant but at last we are all seeing them at full strength. The entire family of asters gives long flowerbeds a great finale in contrasting shades of white, rose-pink and violet blue. There is no need to give these lovely plants a border entirely to themselves, as big gardens used to display them in the age of their champion, Gertrude Jekyll. They make enough of an impact if they are fitted in twos or threes at intervals down a border’s length. As earlier plants go over, they can be cut back to the ground, leaving these late asters room into which to expand.

Here are three of my blue October favourites. In general I avoid the novi-belgii varieties, lovely though the colours are, because so many of them tend to be disfigured by mildew. I use the novae-angliae forms instead and many of the smaller-flowered varieties of cordifolius and ericoides. The unsurpassed winner is the cordifolius hybrid, Little Carlow, my supreme border plant of the moment. Its starry mid-blue flowers are so prolific and so intense that they lift an entire garden out of the ordinary. It seems to revel in a dry autumn and, as it is easily divided in spring, it can be dotted all round the garden’s vistas and left to amaze you year after year.

For height up to five feet, none beats the small-flowered Cordifolius Chieftain. It has such impact and such grace in a paler shade of blue but I seldom see it around. Again it spreads when happy and seems quite unbothered by dry soil. My plant began life in competition with a tall Rosa Glauca but trained on strongly to win the contest and now occupies twice the space it originally claimed. It needs light staking from July on but is worth the effort.

One of the brightest collections of these asters is open daily to the public at Waterperry Gardens near Wheatley, Oxfordshire. Last autumn its mid-October borders persuaded me to give a better, damper site to the small-flowered Aster Cordifolius Silver Spray. It is a pale silvery-blue and flowers so profusely that it is worth five of the heavier-flowered varieties. About 3ft high, it is so easy to please and has responded to kindness by flowering madly. Why equate October with grim old age or fear the advancing years and seasons while there are such wonderful plants to hand? Choose carefully and you too will have an October garden that is a joy to return to, even in dry weather.