VAL BOURNE recommends long-flowering plants for autumn

There is nothing special about the rose border in the picture. At least there wouldn't be if the shot hadn't been taken in mid-November. Usually by then penstemons, roses, hardy geraniums and anthemis have been cut back by frosts. But this year's mild weather has kept things going.

Late flowers help to sustain wildlife, especially hibernators, and last week I spotted a painted lady butterfly dodging the falling beech leaves. There are still one or two bees and wasps buzzing about as well.

If flowers are in short supply in your garden, I can recommend several long-flowering plants. Perhaps the one that's amazed me most is a lemon-yellow daisy with finely-cut grey-green foliage, Anthemis Susanna Mitchell'. It's been flowering since June and new flowers are still appearing. Susanna Mitchell' is a hybrid between two species.

One parent is the white-flowered Anthemis punctata subsp. cupaniana. This is often grown sprawling over walls in sunny, dry positions and this fresh-as-a-diasy plant can flower as early as April. The second is the yellow-flowered A. tinctoria - a woody stemmed upright plant with lemon-yellow daisies.

Anthemis Susanna Mitchell' is a soft, leafy plant with hybrid vigour and, like many hybrids, it has completely sterile flowers. They cannot set seed and for this reason the plant just carries on flowering.

Many hybrid hardy geraniums share this sterile trait and the blue Orion' is still going strong too, along with a smaller, cushion forming geranium called Purple Pillow'.

Of course gardeners induce their own form of sterility when they deadhead to extend the flowering season. I must have over 20 different penstemons still in flower purely because they have been regularly deadheaded. Among those, there are wands of guara and these very delicate, slender flower spikes, looking rather like emaciated verbascums, come in soft apple whites and pinks.

Guara lindheimeri, the most commonly grown, is one of easiest perennials to raise from seed and it has an elegant grace and an ability to carry on late, even in colder autumns.

Plant breeders have also provided us with a variegated one called Corrie's Gold' and several different pinks. They will all come through most winters in well-drained gardens.

There are also stray stems of alstroemeria clinging on to their flowers and I have late asters too. Most are white forms of Aster ericoides and they bear tiny starry flowers on branched stems. I still have dahlias and salvias too because frosts roll down the hill here.

These lingering blooms are vestiges of summer. But I also have some early harbingers of spring as well. The Algerian iris, Iris unguicularis, is already flowering in its preferred south-facing position and it will go on until April. The upright, pallid yellow racemes of Mahonia x media Winter Sun' are full of promise, as are the plump buds of the witch hazels. And many of you will already be enjoying winter jasmine, Jasminium nudiflorum, with its spiky olive-green stems studded in yellow stars. Every garden needs at least one and this versatile plant can be clipped into hedges, trained on walls, or used for an arch.

It may be November and grim weather is surely on the horizon. But my garden is still surprising and delighting me.