Gardening in August continues to be transformed by changes in which plants are available and by changes in taste. You might think that Britain has all the luck: a variable August climate, days of broken sunlight when flowers look their best and temperatures in which plants will go on growing. In fact, UK Augusts have not always been popular. They are not much good for gardeners who love shrub roses. Their main job throughout the month is deadheading, as they wait for a second season of flower in September. Border planters tend to identify August with too much yellow.

The great cottage gardener Margery Fish used to write from her Somerset jungle of rare plants how she was always having to guard against too much yellow in the garden, never more so than in August. On first reading her, I remember looking at my father’s yellow heliopsis and their fine double daisy-flowers and suggesting that we had had enough of them. He disagreed, dismissing Fish as an old trout. She was more than that but the heliopsis deservedly stayed put. Forty years later we are all embracing yellow rather than running shy of it. Those upstanding heliopsis would be all the rage.