Carol Klein is enjoying the eruption of wood anemones at Glebe Cottage
From one or two pots, you can soon establish a thriving colony of this delightful spring flower
With a week of dull weather and torrential showers, everything on the shady side of the garden was looking a bit bedraggled, but when the sun finally decided to shine, what a transformation there was!
In almost all the small beds that make up that side of the garden, white flowers suddenly appeared as though there’d been a snow shower with enormous snowflakes. But this show didn’t melt – it was composed of hundreds of blooms of our native wood anemone, A. nemorosa.
Wood anemones can disappear on a dull day. The flowers remain closed and hang their heads, protecting delicate and precious pollen from lashing rain. When the sun shines, stems straighten and the flowers are held aloft, their petals unfurl, revelling in the sun and the pompoms of yellow anthers, rich in pollen, announce their presence to every pollinating insect in the vicinity. As the sun moves across the blue spring sky, the flowers follow it and, as it sets, they hang their heads and fold up their petals. The wood anemone, Anemone nemorosa, like so many woodland plants, is a true Cinderella, exploiting the brief period in spring when the soil’s warming up but before the canopy fills in overhead. It gets everything done – flowering, making seed and distributing it – before the clock strikes 12! Many of these spring woodlanders have bulbs (or tubers) in which to store food until it’s needed to produce new growth; they nearly all go to sleep, remaining dormant throughout summer, autumn and winter. A. nemorosa has small, slender rhizomes, which rapidly spread through leaf litter just below the soil surface.
As always, emulating nature is the simplest way to increase numbers. Break small pieces of rhizome off the parent plant and replant with a little fresh compost or leaf mould 2–5cm (1–2in) below the soil surface. If the weather’s dry, water well and mulch with leaf mould or chipped bark. From one or two pots, you can soon establish a thriving colony, each piece of rhizome will rapidly make a new plant. In future years, you can repeat the process to reproduce the kind of picture Mother Nature paints. This is best tackled during dormancy, or just as the leaves are dying back.
The British native plant has white flowers, subtly shaded with lavender-pink on their reverse. There are more than 40 recorded varieties of wood anemone. Some look very much alike, although there are subtle differences between selections. Most are natural variants noticed by keen-eyed botanists and gardeners and introduced to garden society on account
of their unusual colour, the quality or size of their flower or an esoteric, or occasionally quirky, characteristic. Some are exceedingly beautiful, others truly odd. None surpasses the simple beauty of the wild wood anemone. Of all the others, Anemone
nemorosa ‘Robinsoniana’ is probably my favourite. Like all wood anemones, it looks best grown en masse. It has elegant buds of dove-grey that open to reveal chalices of pale azure. We grow it with plants with yellow leaves – Bowles’s golden grass, Milium effusum ‘Aureum’, or Valeriana phu ‘Aurea’ – the blue is made all the bluer and the golden anthers are all the more noticeable. Anemone nemorosa
‘Robinsoniana’ has real ‘flower power’ and, despite being only a few inches tall, it makes a conspicuous impact in the spring garden.
‘Pompoms of yellow anthers, rich in pollen, announce their presence to every pollinating insect in the vicinity’