WEED ARRANGEMENTS
Montbretia is a weed that you might like the look of, writes Leigh Bramwell.
PRIOR TO THE PAST 10 days it has rained at our place every day since about May. All right — that may be a slight exaggeration but honestly, it’s pretty close to the mark. So we could be forgiven for not having the garden in tip-top shape.
Then in July The Landscaper and I got Covid and I got Long Covid, so not a lot got done in the garden for several weeks.
I never planted the vegetable garden, I didn’t grow the flowers I’d been yearning for, and I certainly didn’t crawl about in my exhausted Long Covid state yanking out weeds.
Which is just as well, because after close to a year of neglect, weeds are the most prolific thing we have. Hard-pressed to find anything else, I went foraging around the property and decided they were my best option for creating some innovative flower arrangements.
My go-to is Montbretia. Certainly it is classified as a weed and appears on numerous regional council websites with admonishments about how naughty it is. Nonetheless I love seeing its cheerful orange flowers all around the edge of the stream, and I’m fascinated by the variation in its colours.
Not to be a show-off, but Montbretia is a garden hybrid of C. aurea and C. pottsii, two plants of the genus Crocosmia and was first bred away back in 1880. It grows from perennial corms that are often spread in garden rubbish.
I’ve teamed it up in a glass vase with carrot weed (Daucus carota) which has delicate white blooms. If you like the stark look you can leave it at that, but a bit of foliage from a Campsis trumpet vine looks good with it and I think it would also work really well with gone-to-seed parsley, fennel or dill.
However, carrot weed is an invasive pasture weed, especially in Northland, but despite its nickname animals won’t eat it so it can become quite dominant in pastures once it flowers. I’m doing my bit by grabbing the flowers from my neighbour’s paddock, and spraying them with hairspray so they don’t drop all over the windowsill.
Verbena bonariensis, or purple top, is a tall, slender-stemmed perennial with creeping rhizomes. It has vibrant purple flowers that appear from summer until autumn and looks a bit like the statice we used to use in dried flower bunches. You wouldn’t look twice at it on its own, but stuffed in a vase with a couple of seed heads and some dead foliage I combed out of the carex grass, it makes a rather stylish arrangement if I do say so myself.
I have a few stands of aggies around the place and I always choose the white ones for cutting. However, agapanthus is actually a perennial weed from South
Africa. It’s a prolific seeder, lives a long time, and thrives in nearly any climate. Here in the Far North it is regarded as a cunning, scheming, dangerous weed plotting to obliterate all our native plants.
Happily, though, there are agapanthus hybrids that are either sterile or low fertility that can be planted and enjoyed guilt-free. I love the tall white aggies just on their own in a vase, but you can go for the dwarf varieties (Agapetit, white, and Baby Pete, brilliant blue) for shorter, denser arrangements.
And even naughtier than agapanthus is pampas grass. It became popular a few years ago for stylish bridal bouquets and for use in floral arrangements and interior design, winning out over our native toetoe because its upright, feathery fronds come in white, cream, pink and purple. But the Ministry for Primary Industries says not only should people be discouraged from using the weed, but that it is actually forbidden under the Biosecurity Act 1993. So if you want feathery fronds for your wedding bouquet — or for anything else — choose toetoe. It’s ours.