I recently had the great privilege of interviewing Carol Skinner, of Eastgrove Cottage Garden for a retrospective article to celebrate their closure after 35 years of garden opening. If you didn’t get there, Eastgrove was a masterclass in colour-themed planting and Carol was the magician. The black and white cottage was down a rough track and one couple even destroyed two tyres in their enthusiasm to get there. Husband Malcolm’s home-made ice cream was an extra bonus.

Carol is up there on a par with Beth Chatto when it comes to planting and I listened to her swansong with awe.

Her first piece of advice was to link the garden to the house and to feel its presence so that they hold hands.

Her second was to create surprises and add that touch of mystery.

Third, keep a notebook to write down ideas as they occur. Dedicate one page to each area. Then get out and visit other gardens and write down any good ideas and combinations.

But the advice I found the most useful was to have vertical accents to break up the mounds that most plants produce. Don’t let your borders look like rumpled quilts. Use swords, shapes and spires to break the monotony, and that way you will link your border to the sky above.

The sword-shaped leaves of crocosmias do this extremely well because they create bold lines among cushions of foliage.

Most have green foliage, although one or two (including ‘Solfatare’) are bronzed. One of the most handsome is Alan Bloom’s ‘Lucifer’. This July-flowering crocosmia has bright-green pleated leaves and equally bright-red flowers. It emerged in the mid- 1960s and was deliberately bred in the days when crocosmias were split into three different genera.

Alan took Crocosmia masoniorum as his main breeding plant because the green foliage is handsome and the flowers (which appear by late-July) are upward facing. They almost look like birds in flight as they swoop upwards. Typically, they are a burnished bronze and quite tubular in shape and, once autumn comes, they form a good seed head.

Bloom wanted bright-red, large flowers and he hybridised with any red-flowered forms that were available to him in the late 1950s.

One was selected as the best, and Alan decided that he needed a special name for his special plant. At the time a Latin master from a nearby public school, who was a volunteer on Alan’s steam railway, was asked to come up with one. As he sat down one Sunday evening to mark the inevitable pile of books awaiting his attention, he went to light his pipe. As he picked up his box of matches the name ‘Lucifer’ sprang out at him — and it sums up the plant brilliantly.

Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ gave rise to many seedlings. Bloom named a series and I think ‘Spitfire’ is probably the best, although the flowers are smaller and an orange-red.

Some people, like the late Christopher Lloyd, dismiss ‘Lucifer’ on the grounds of its July flowering and certainly most others flower later. ‘Severn Sunset’, an aptly named shimmering orange-pink, and the starry bronzed ‘Star of the East’ are often out in late-September, so it’s very possible to have crocosmia flowers from July until October. I think Carol values plants like this for their sharp lines.

Bob Brown, of Cotswold Garden Flowers, has the best range in the country (tel 01386 833849 (www.cgf.net).