Carol Klein
Cherished plants that are generous enough to self-seed often make the party go with a swing
‘I go to great lengths to beat the slugs to the seed pods of my Trilliums!’
In any garden, especially if you let your plants go to seed, there are bound to be uninvited guests at your garden party. Some of them may be undesirables who you’ll persuade to leave at the first opportunity – often what makes a weed a weed is the ease with which it manages to self-seed – but many of our more cherished garden plants are generous enough to seed themselves in our flower beds. I like to think of them as gatecrashers, but they’re often the characters that make the party go with a swing.
At Glebe Cottage, the garden is enlivened by these ambitious plants and it’s now, in late spring, they bring themselves to our attention. As I weed flower beds or just walk up the steps, I’m aware that plants I haven’t cultivated are making an appearance. The very first time I found a self-seeded plant here at Glebe Cottage, nearly 39 years ago, I couldn’t believe my eyes. I knew we hadn’t planted it, so how did it get there?
Since then, many thousands of ornamental plants have graced our garden. They soften edges, fill in gapsg and provide us with extra plants for new schemes.
Some are straightforward. Alchemilla mollis seeds itself profusely and many gardeners regard it as a nuisance but, at the height of its midsummer frothiness, nothing can compare to the romance it lends, especially around old roses.
If you’ve got too many seedlings, dig some out and pot them up, preferably in loambased compost. Use them elsewhere later or swap them. One year, we dug out masses of it but missed it hugely. Enjoying beads of dew in the centre of its round, pleated leaves or cutting masses of its foamy, lime-green flowers to accompany sweet peas, are two of the joys of summer.
Geraniums, too, seed themselves around happily. One we welcome here is G. pratense, our own native meadow cranesbill. Backlit by evening sun, it makes pictures that would be difficult to create deliberately. Originally, we put in just one plant of the typical blue-flowered form, it now turns up in a myriad
of different blues, pinks, whites and soft greys. The thuggish member of the family is
G. nodosum, evergreen, with bright new foliage in spring and hundreds of purple flowers. It’s seemingly indestructible and though it makes a healthy display and probably covers a multitude of sins with efficient ground cover, you can have too much of a good thing. Fortunately, we started with a special seedling
with very deep purple flowers,
given to me by my friend, grower John Fielding, so at least they’re not the wishy-washy form you often see!
If you’re lucky, some very special plants will seed themselves, too. I go to great lengths to beat the slugs to the seed pods of Trillium chloropetalum, then carefully nurture the seedlings for years until they flower. Though I do find clumps of young, self-seeded plants where slugs must have left the seeds after eating their outside coating. Hooray for slugs – and for ants too, who move around cyclamen seeds and drop a few en route to their nests! You don’t really expect Dactylorhiza elata, the robust
marsh orchid, to appear out of the blue, but on several occasions we’ve had them pop up in pots of other plants we’ve divided or grown from seed. We usually plant the whole pot out and hope they’ll survive.
These orchids like a damp spot but even in dry places, there are ambitious characters who want to spread themselves around. Give Erigeron karvinskianus a foothold in a wall and it’ll seed
itself into every crack and crevice. Nothing could be more delightful
than cascades of its pretty pink
and white daisies. It demands no attention, apart from removal of old stems first thing in the spring. Eryngium bourgatii, that most handsome sea holly, is equally self-sufficient.
Gardeners who have to be in control may resent self-seeders, pulling them out at the first opportunity. But if, like me, you welcome them into your garden,
you’ll regard them as a bonus and take it as a compliment that they’ve had the good grace to appear in just the right place!