“My top tips for gorgeous wallflowers” says Anne
Don’t be shy – wallflowers have wads of entertainment value, says Anne Swithinbank
ON a warm spring day, the rich and distinctive scent of wallflowers rises in the air. Neither sweet nor cloying, it perfectly matches the mahogany, cherry, cream and egg yolk shades of their blooms.
These are the saturated colours of tapestry silks or velvet curtains and make great planting partners for elaborate fringed or parrot tulips.
Botanically, the common wallflowers we grow are cultivars of Erysimum
cheiri, a species native to Southern Europe best described as a short-lived, slightly shrubby evergreen perennial.
They’re thought to have arrived in Britain with the Normans and were popular components of tussie-mussies – small bunches of flowers and herbs held tight to the nose while crossing filthy streets.
Here on the South Coast I’m used to seeing feral wallflowers that have seeded themselves from allotments and gardens to germinate and grow in nooks and crannies on rocky slopes. You’ll see them studding the cliffs at Beer in East Devon and from the coast path at Daddy Hole in Torquay.
That they choose to grow where there’s good drainage, poor, preferably alkaline soil, an open position and plenty of sunshine demonstrates what they’d like to find in beds and borders.
In the garden we tend to treat wallflowers as biennials, so they’re sown from seed in the May or June of one year to plant out in early autumn and flower the following spring.
The established method is to sow direct to a shallow drill made in a seedbed, perhaps on an allotment or veg plot, thin them out or transplant the seedlings until roughly 7in (17cm) apart and eventually move them to their flowering positions on a cool, damp day in autumn.
The alternative is to sow into a tray and then transplant one seedling per module and plant out from there.