With a bit of know-how, it's not difficult to grow on your plot
The fortunes of agapanthus in British gardens are on the up. Once regarded as desirable but difficult, many of us are realising that growing them successfully is straightforward. If we can offer them the sort of conditions they experience in their native home, they can adorn our beds and borders, as well as containers.
Agapanthus come from South Africa, most growing in the mountains of the Southern Cape. Plants experience cold winters, plenty of sunshine, copious moisture though sharp drainage and mainly acidic soil.
In our gardens they’re accommodating plants and can tolerate a wide range of conditions.
The group that interests most gardeners, and which needs little cossetting, are the campanulatus hybrids, which make brilliant and reliable garden plants. Their stature and colour vary enormously, although always in the range of blues and whites. All have narrow leaves that they lose during winter. Their common need is for fertile soil and a sunny position where clumps will increase happily year by year.
A mulch of home-made compost or well-rotted manure applied around the crowns in spring should ensure good flowering and all-round vigour, and it isn’t a bad idea to heap soil over the crowns through the worst of the winter weather as a precaution. Every few years, clumps can be divided in spring. First lift them and clean off the roots to see better what you’re doing and chop into a few pieces with a sharp spade or tease them apart using back-to-back forks. Replant in new positions with soil enriched with organic matter, home-made compost is best.
Because division is a vegetative process, new plants are clones of their parent. Another way of producing more agapanthus, though with more random results, is growing from seed. Collecting your own seed, growing it on then returning a batch of plants you’ve raised yourself to the garden is an exciting process. Collect seed when the seed head is becoming brown and the capsules are beginning to burst. If the weather is starting to turn cold you can collect seed prematurely and store the whole seed head in paper bags, but for preference allow seed to ripen on the plant.
Sow seeds fresh and prick out seedlings individually next spring.
With a bit of luck they should come to flower the following season when you can see the merits of individual plants. If some are extra special, divide them when they’re big enough plants to make more of your favourites.
Extract the seed from its pods when they’re brown and dry. They should fall out easily and sow them straight away. You can store them until the next spring, but germination won’t be as successful. When you’ve sown them, cover the surface of the compost with sharp grit.
When seedlings have strong shoots and roots, knock them out of the tray and carefully separate them. Pot up seedlings individually into modules or small containers. Finish the surface of each pot with grit to retain moisture, keep down weeds and provide drainage around the crown of plant.
While filming in the Gravel Garden at The Beth Cha o Gardens the other day, I fell in love with a li le plant called Teucrium lucidrys. It’s the same plant, hybrid germander, used sometimes as a low hedge, especially in herb gardens. Here in thin, poor soil and gravel and after three months with just a couple of inches of rain, it was particularly compact. At first I mistook it for a thyme, of which there were several varieties carpeting the ground further round the island bed where it was growing, but it was taller and its flowers, though small, were bigger than those
We’re drawing towards the end of filming for our new Channel 5 series Great British Gardens: Season by Season, visiting eight outstanding gardens up and down the country. One of the gardens we’ve been lucky enough to film in is Marchants in East Sussex and when we visited a few weeks ago, Graham Gough and his wife Lucy told us about how they breed and select agapanthus – one of their specialities. Nursery manager Hannah Fox showed us how pollen is moved from one plant to another to pollinate and attempt to combine qualities of both parents. They’ve succeeded in creating several varieties with deep blue flowers on plants of shorter stature. Some of the most promising will be planted out and, after ‘trialling’ them, the best will be selected and propagated by division. We saw some of the first flowers on new plants – spectacular! of the thymes.
But what really drew my a ention was the sound emanating from the patch, a constant buzz from bees of every shape and size. As they foraged and feasted, the moving flowers created the illusion that the whole patch was alive! We’ll give it a
Teucrium lucidrys try in a stone trough that’s presently standing empty. Our local bees will love it!