Helen Chesnut
It’s a happy day in autumn when the first garden catalogue arrives. Routinely, the one that comes first in the mail is from Plant World Seeds (PWS) in Devon, England. The catalogue arrived at a perfect time, on Oct. 31, just as the almost summer-like weather was about to switch abruptly to winter.
PWS is a catalogue for gardeners who relish venturing into the unusual and the unknown. Perennials occupy the bulk of the catalogue, with smaller sections of vegetable, climber, tree and shrub listings.
One of the more extensively represented perennials is the hardy geranium, with 19 listings that include the long-flowering Geranium endressii and ‘Jester’s Jacket’ — a variety with leaves speckled in red and white beneath pink flowers through the summer and autumn. Three forms are listed of the wonderfully easy, grow-anywhere bigroot geranium (G. macrorrhizum).
I plan to try G. albanum, whose 30- to 45-cm plants with “magenta-veined, shocking pink flowers on spreading stems” are described as long-flowering and “underrated.”
One of the toughest and most charming seed-grown plants I’ve grown in recent years, using seeds from PWS, is Phacelia bolanderi. My plants have formed low mats of soft, hairy leaves. From late spring through the summer, short stems appear bearing flared, lavenderblue, trumpet-shaped flowers.
This perennial is pictured and described as a good bee plant in
Victory Gardens for Bees, by Lori Weidenhammer, who suggests growing it under oak trees.
Here are a few more PWS listings that may be of interest to home gardeners: • Erodium pelargoniflorum, a 30-cm geranium relative with large, violet-veined white flowers above crinkled, fragrant leaves from winter’s end to midsummer. • Dianthus cruentus is described as a “brilliant” perennial that “made a sensation when the
Daily Telegraph won best in show with it at Chelsea in 2011.” This “blood pink” bears clusters of deepest red flowers on 30 to 40 cm, wiry stems above blue-green, evergreen foliage. • Tomato ‘Micro’ grows to only 13 cm high, “but still manages to produce dozens of tiny fruit. Suitable for people with no growing space, and an astonishing conversation piece.” Micro can be grown in a 15-cm wide pot or window box. • Desiree runner bean. During the past three hot summers, I heard from many gardeners frustrated that their runner bean plants failed to set pods. Unlike the usual type pole beans, runner beans set pods most easily in cool conditions with a moist, cool root run. Exceptions are whiteflowered, white-seeded varieties like Desiree, a stringless runner that will bear heavy crops even in hot, dryish conditions. • Kellog’s Breakfast is an orange beefsteak tomato with a “sweet, tangy flavour. … Our trial plants were loaded with fruits, and were unusually strong and healthy looking.” In my experience, really good orange tomato varieties have a truly sparkling flavour. I’ll be trying this one next year. • Angel Towers is a snapdragon (Antirrhinum) produced by crossing a “tall, hardy, wild perennial Antirrhinum with a modern cultivar to produce these tall, shrub-like, constantly flowering, long-lived, unique and spectacular new plants” with pale pink to reddish purple flowers. A timing issue. I’m often asked when to sow certain winter vegetables, in particular over-wintering cauliflower and sprouting broccoli varieties. The problem is that a suggested time frame for seeding might not work well in every garden. I don’t always manage to hit the sweet seeding spot for these vegetables, but this year I did. I seeded Red Spear sprouting broccoli (West Coast Seeds) and Purple Cape over-wintering cauliflower (Salt Spring Seeds) indoors on June 11 and transplanted about six weeks later. That timing has produced superbly sturdy plants that should yield a good harvest of sweet, purple flower-bud shoots and dark violet heads of cauliflower in late winter to early spring, depending on the weather.
An indoor seeding of a baby broccoli or “broccolini” called Aspabroc made at the end of May and transplanted at the end of June developed nicely and then stalled in the summer heat, to explode into production with the cooler temperatures and rains of October. This variety usually begins producing its tasty shoots within two months of transplanting. For six weeks now, I’ve been harvesting twice weekly. The frosty weather early in the month didn’t set the planting back a bit. Aspabroc is a gem of a plant.