Category Archives: plant of the month

Plant of the month: June

20 Monday Jun 2011

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Hemerocallis dumortieri

Every time I see this plant it takes my breath away. And that’s not something I say very often about daylilies.

Most hemerocallis are, let’s face it, a bit vulgar. A bit in-yer-face, look at me, let it all hang out and let’s see who can talk the loudest. If they were people they’d wear braces and you’d know within five minutes of meeting them how much they earned and that they had a Ferrari and/or 4×4 Landcruiser in the garage.

There seems to be a competition among breeders at the moment to see who can produce the biggest flowers, the largest petals, the brightest colours. More recently there’s been a fad for wierd petal shapes. They couldn’t stop at the quite-attractive spider types: oh, no. They had to have twisted petals or ones that droop like strips of wet newspaper or ones with frilly edges. Over 400 new varieties were added to the RHS Plantfinder last year alone, for heaven’s sake.

Well: we’ve all been here before. Petunias, double hollyhocks, those poor benighted begonias you see in the garden centres churned out by the gazillion with day-glo colours and choking on their own flowers. I don’t think the daylily hybridising factory has gone quite that far… yet. But they’re getting there.

Despite all the overbreeding I do have a soft spot for hemerocallis. They count as edibles in my garden: when I’m feeling exotic I snap off a flower bud as I wander by and munch it as I walk, or wow the local kids by inviting them to eat a petal or two.

If you’re very, very careful, and avoid the hoi polloi like the plague, there’s an elite class of daylily which is untouched by all the common-as-muck excess: a group which maintains its elegance, its poise and its exquisite beauty with a haughty froideur that elevates to a definite cut above.

Hemerocallis dumortieri is perhaps the most genuinely classy daylily of them all. Not for her the bigger-is-better brigade: she knows that all the best things come in small packages. Her flowers are just the right shade of buttery yellow and she knows she has no need for frills and flounces: like so many things in life, she’s all the more eloquent for her simplicity.

She doesn’t overdo the tastefulness though. Like most girls with instinctive style, she knows that if you’re going to carry off a look – if you’re going to tip the balance from pretty to drop-dead gorgeous – you need to give it one well-judged flash of brilliance. With H. dumortieri it’s her wine-dark buds, emerging in abundance from the foliage (also, in its slender strappiness – so fine in comparison to the thuggish clumps daylies usually form – sheer perfection).

An exquisite blend of Dubonnet and coke, the eruption of yellow from within is a real tour de force. For a final, definitive coup d’elegance the burgundy is retained as a brush stroke of contrast on the back of just the right number of yellow petals.

She doesn’t even do that mildly irritating thing other daylilies do, casting off their spent flowers in drooping rags which if left hanging about spoil the appearance of the plant within hours. The spent flowers here are discreetly borne: you have to seek them out among the profusion of new growth if you are to dead-head and keep the display at its full, dazzling splendour.

This is a daylily to covet, arriving fashionably early in the season, stealing the show long before the crowd turns up. I can’t even fault her for being high-maintenance: in fact my clump has been here since before I arrived, evidence that she can cope with many, many years of neglect and still come back to give of her best.

All in all, this daylily has a lesson for all those plant breeders out there. If you’re looking to create something that will really captivate hearts, just remember: less is more.

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Plant of the month: May

31 Monday May 2010

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Euphorbia polychroma

Did you ever see anything so like summer?

I grow many euphorbias, which love my dry, sandy soil. E. martinii for its smoky flowers and burgundy stems, the slightly tender E. mellifera (clobbered by this winter’s frosts but I hope recovering), E. cyparissias ‘Fens Ruby’ which I’m forever having to dig out of places it shouldn’t be, but I forgive it anything for its feathery burgundy foliage in spring; E. myrsinites to snake around the skirts of other plants, and a few self-seeded E. robbiae from who knows where.

I love them when they’re flowering, but for the rest of the year they can look a little gaunt, I find. That’s fine in my jungle garden where wierd and gaunt-looking plants abound, but not so happy in the cottagey riot of summer flowers elsewhere. So I tend to hide the foliage behind other things.

Not so Euphorbia polychroma. This is the Jeeves of the plant world: a plant which in a garden full of the unruly, the mischievous and the downright contrary always, always, knows the right thing to do.

In spring, just when you need a foil to your muscari and crocuses, the clear lime-green foliage starts frothing up from the ground. Gradually it expands like a delicate bubble: never too quickly, as it would never be so rude as to outshine the tulips or the daffodils, but just quickly enough to provide a green backdrop at just the right scale.

Then finally, when it reaches a neat and tidy naturally domed shape of such perfect uniformity that nobody believes I don’t clip it, and just when the tulips are going over and you’re starting to want something else to look at, the acid yellow flowers appear – in reality, of course, bracts that attract attention to the inconspicuous true flowers in the centre. They are of a brilliant purity that reminds you of the sun even when there isn’t any in the sky: and when there is, they glow with a luminescence of sunshiny joy that they make me smile every time I look at them.

They last a satisfyingly long time but not so long as to outstay their welcome. I grow an apricot rose behind it, and the brightest yellows last, obligingly, just long enough to combine rather fetchingly with the orangey shades of the rose. Then, like all good performers, it knows when to stop hogging the limelight and retires gracefully into the wings as the bracts fade back to green. Even then it judges its role perfectly, providing a green of just the right shade to set off the daylilies, rock roses and potentilla that also tumble around it.

There it stays, good-natured and accommodating to the last. It keeps its dignity and poise well into winter and sometimes into spring too if heavy rains haven’t bent the branches out of shape, looking terribly sculptural with a good frost.

The only time it’s even remotely demanding is when you need to snip away each branch right to the ground in early spring just as the new shoots come through (wearing gloves, as one of this plant’s few faux pas is to emit an irritating sap when pruned). Then you wait for the whole thing to happen all over again. There’s no better-behaved plant in my garden.

Plant of the month: January

18 Monday Jan 2010

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Box
Buxus sempervirens


Sometimes there are moments when you’re really, really grateful for the boring plants in your garden.

If the garden is a stage, box is the understudy. For most of the year, all but un-noticed, it does its job quietly and uncomplainingly, taking a back seat, never seeking attention, supporting the star cast and for all I know making them regular cups of tea.

But in winter, it’s different. In winter, box steps shyly out into centre stage. All around her are tiring, fading, looking definitely jaded. A coat of frost turns them to brown and unlovely mush. But not box.

A crisply clipped box hedge frosted with silver is one of the most beautiful sights of the winter garden. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that no garden is entirely complete without one. They look fantastic in modern gardens and elegant in traditional ones. They can be whimsical, magical, artistic or geometric; box balls may be verging dangerously close to the clichéd these days, but what of box cubes, box columns, box spirals or box pyramids?

And it’s so well-behaved. It doesn’t grow too quickly – or too slowly. It doesn’t have any fussy requirements about soil, and it’s obligingly happiest in shade. It isn’t damaged by frost, or hail, or snow, and doesn’t demand primping or preening or much attention at all beyond a haircut a couple of times a year.

My little box hedge in the front garden is still in its fluffy and slightly wayward infancy: it hasn’t quite knitted together yet and still carries more than a whiff of its wild cousins growing near us on Box Hill. But even so when I look down on the half-circles it draws so effortlessly and cleanly in the gravel of my drive, I marvel that this is the one thing in my garden I’m properly pleased with. All year round – whether you’re looking at it or not. And that, if you ask me, is true star quality.

Plant of the month: September

19 Saturday Sep 2009

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Amaranthus paniculatus ‘Marvel Bronze’

This was a bit of a discovery this year: I’ve grown the droopy Amaranthus caudatus many times, both the species and ‘Viridis’ which is an elegant shade of green, but they tend to be quite difficult to shoehorn into a mixed border, being one of those shapes that demands a space all its own. So then I was given a packet of seed for this variety last spring, and since I hadn’t got round to buying my usual Amaranthus, I bunged these in instead.

The species is the key: they’re a paniculatus, not caudatus, and this means they’re upright. And I do mean very upright: they’re currently marching through my borders like so many purple soldiers, waving those plum-coloured pipecleaners aloft: sometimes straight upwards in tufts like eccentric feather dusters, and at other times sending up individual spires which twist bewitchingly in all directions.

The extraordinary thing for something with such chutzpah of its own is that it goes with absolutely everything. I’ve got one patch next to some dahlias – that purple foliage is almost indistinguishable from that of a purple-leaved dahlia from a short distance, so they blend in perfectly and make excellent partners. Sadly the dahlias are having a little break from flowering at the moment – pesky earwigs – but I have one which is a pale pink-tinged white above purple leaves which looks fabulous with the amaranthus, like white dinnerplates among volcanic plumes of purple smoke.

In the same border are pink cosmos, made all the more frilly and feminine by all that brooding purple, and vivid orange Californian poppies which scramble around under their purple skirts with true pizazz. Actually I haven’t found a single thing they clash with so far. I’m a total convert: must sow more next year…

Plant of the month – October

20 Monday Oct 2008

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Leucanthemella serotina

What a welcome home. This gorgeous 6-footer daisy is peeking over the beech hedge in my front garden at the moment, waving at me from down the street. You can’t help but smile.

It’s supposed to only grow in moist soil, but it seems happy on my sandy loam – I think perhaps the last two very wet summers have had something to do with it. But last year it out-survived a common-or-garden Shasta daisy planted alongside: a shame, since the Shasta daisy finished just as the Leucanthemella began, so they made a great partnership.

I can’t complain, though. This tough, easy-going plant is just soldiering on through: it’s been flowering its socks off for nearly a month now, and shows no signs of flagging. Its teacup-sized flowers have a subtle smoky-green centre, fringed with yellow, that gives a touch of sophistication to all that cheerfulness, so even the most painfully stylish can grow it with confidence. But I just love it for giving my day such a lift but demanding so little in return.

Plant of the month – September

03 Wednesday Sep 2008

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Nicandra physaloides
Shoo-fly plant

I have a hazy memory of sowing a few seeds of this several years ago – but I haven’t done since, yet it pops up in some corner of my garden every year.

These lovely sky-blue flowers remind me of auriculas in the way they have those perfect white circles in the centre. They couldn’t be more different in habit though – Nicandra is a big, beefy, fast-growing plant to about 4ft high with lush, almost tropical foliage. It’s supposed to repel flies – hence the common name – and some use it as a companion plant to get rid of cabbage whitefly and the like.

The charms of these pretty blooms are fleeting – they last just a few days, and even then they won’t open if it’s not sunny. But the spectacular seedpods are worth all that coquettish reticence: they’re delicate papery lanterns some two inches across that start vivid green and turn nut-brown with age. They last for ages (if the kids don’t pop them all first) and shed their seeds generously: weed out all but one in only the places you really want them, or there won’t be room for anything else.

Plant of the month – June

03 Thursday Jul 2008

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Geranium ‘Ann Folkard’

Well… actually, this might be G. psilostemon, but I don’t think so. I’ve lost the label (as with so many of my plants) and my memory of writing ‘Ann Folkard’ somewhere is hazy, but extant.

Anyway, this gorgeous floozy has taken a while to get into her finery, suffering as she has from far too much competition in previous years while she was trying to establish herself. I belatedly realised this last year so she got a nice year free of anyone else trying to outdo her, and has rewarded me this summer with the most unbelievably spectacular fireworks of in-yer-face magenta pink. She’s forgiven her thuggish neighbours to such an extent, in fact, that she’s now clambering among them lovingly, brightening them up no end with her lipsticky kisses. It’s brought some eye-popping combinations – magenta and orange anyone? (this one when she wrapped herself around a neighbouring Californian poppy. It looked sensational).

Magenta pink isn’t usually my thing, but Ann does it so well, and somehow it just looks right, giving the border real pizazz week after week. Hardy geraniums are generally good do-ers, and the fact that this one has managed to survive three years of suffocation and still come through it smiling her head off is testament to just how tough she is. I haven’t watered, cut back, or in any way given her the attention she so clearly deserves – yet she rewards me with this. I think it means she’s forgiven me, so I’ll make it up to her with lots of TLC from now on.

Plant of the month – April

25 Friday Apr 2008

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Amelanchier canadensis

Snowy mespilus

Actually this picture was taken a couple of weeks ago, and the blossom has finished since, but for all that its spectacular display is brief, when snowy mespilus flowers in spring it really steals the show.

These delicate, butterfly flowers are far more graceful than cherries: they’re less overblown, less in-your-face, far more comfortable in their own beautiful skin. These are not flowers that need to shout their arrival: they just appear one day, and everyone drops what they’re doing to stare.

One of the most lovely things about the snowy mespilus blossom is that it appears against the very young growth of the leaves, which at this time of year is tinged a coppery bronze. The combination will take your breath away. This is in many ways the perfect small garden tree: it will now clothe itself with vibrant pale green leaves all summer, provide striking purplish-black berries in autumn, and shed its leaves with a final flourish of vivid orangey-reds. It never gets too big, or too messy-looking, and it’s not too fussy about its soil – it even puts up with my free-draining sand. If you don’t have a mespilus in your garden, go out and buy one right away: you’re missing something very special.

Plant of the month – March

18 Tuesday Mar 2008

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Hyacinth ‘Delft Blue’


I had always thought of hyacinths as the sort of flower your grandma grows. That is, until I saw them in the late great Christopher Lloyd’s border at Great Dixter. As regular readers will know, I’m a big fan of Mr Lloyd’s, so anything that’s good enough for him is good enough for me. When I went, he had ‘King of the Blues’ in his Long Border, and it truly zinged out at you from among the spring flowers – not gaudy, as some over-bred primroses are, for example, but just pure, joyous blue.

I couldn’t find ‘King of the Blues’ so had to opt for ‘Delft Blue’ – a more commonly-grown type but nonetheless superb for that. At this time of year its uncompromising china blue stands up beautifully to the butter-yellow daffodils all around it – this is not a wishy-washy plant, and all the better for it. You can force them to grow indoors – the usual excuse is to enjoy the scent at close quarters, but to be honest I find it overwhelming and a little sickly in the house. Far better to have it scattered on the wind so you catch a little puff of it as you pass by – one of those utterly blissful moments that gardening is all about. It seems grandma knew a trick or two after all.

Plant of the month – February

27 Wednesday Feb 2008

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Libertia peregrinans

I discovered this plant through Christopher Lloyd, who writes about it in his book, “Succession Planting for Adventurous Gardeners” – something of a bible of mine. Anyway, as so often with new (to me, anyway) plants Lloyd suggests, it’s quickly become a firm favourite of mine.

It’s what they call a good do-er – rarely needs any particular TLC, tough as anything, evergreen – or should that be evergold in this case? – and just does its stuff all year round. It’s an excellent plant for structure – I’ve got it planted between a Spiraea japonica “Gold Mound” and a Pinus mugo, where it retreats into the background a bit in summer and then at this time of the year (and indeed for most of the winter) really shines out. It has a lovely, warm burnished bronzey-gold colour that glows in low sunshine and makes those sword-like leaves shoot up, shining, from the surrounding plants.

Mine is still a young plant, but I’m hoping if it’s happy it’ll form a nice beefy clump in time. It almost seems like an afterthought, but it does also have pretty iris-like white flowers later in spring, too.