You little beauty

Lily of the valley may look unassuming, but its scent is gorgeous

There are some plants in the garden that just get on with it, demanding little or no fuss and bother. Those which do so, and which also provide us with scented flowers, are to be cherished.

One of them is lily of the valley. You’ll find pots of this little beauty in nurseries and garden centres right now, with bright green scrolls of leaves just beginning to unfurl from the compost. At the centre of these leaf scrolls a fragilelooking flower stem will eventually arise, with tiny white bells along its length.

And the perfume! It really is mesmerising. The blooms open in April and May and are a welcome addition to any garden, not just those around picture-book thatched cottages.

The plant’s botanical name is Convallaria majalis, and it has been a staple of many a cottage garden since time immemorial.

The shoots emerge from rhizomes (underground stems) that snuggle just below the surface of the soil, and, for some obscure reason, in the bud stage they are always referred to as “pips”.

Lily of the valley is useful as ground cover in shady spots.

It prefers dappled shade but, in extreme circumstances, it will put up with quite heavy gloom, though its flowering capability will fall off a little if conditions are too dingy.

Whether you garden on acid or alkaline soil, heavy or light, this plant really does not seem to mind, and I have even seen it romping away in dry, impoverished earth at the foot of a house wall. If you enjoy cutting flowers for the house, yet always feel guilty at robbing the garden, lily of the valley has

the advantage of being one of those plants that you cannot see where you have cut.

Take off a pair of leaves and a flower stem at ground level and you will not leave an unsightly gap.

Better still, on your vegetable patch or allotment, grow a row especially for cutting – and at flowering time you can gather an absolute fistful, binding them into a generous-sized posy with a hank of raffia. The French are especially fond of “muguet” – their name for the plant – and sell fat bunches of it on May 1,

Labour Day, as a ‘porte-bonheur’ or good luck charm.

You will see many folk walking the pavements of Paris on May 1 with a bunch of lily of the valley in their hand, bought from street-side stalls on this one day in the year when it has a special cachet.

But you can do better than that, and give lily of the valley a home in your garden all the year round. It deserves it.