GENEROUS WELCOME

This bronze urn, which once stood in the Parc de Bagatelle in Paris, is one of several given to Vita in 1932 by her mother, and deserves to be the display’s main star. I’ve filled it with a single plant, Glandularia ‘Sissinghurst’, but surrounded it with complementary plants allowed to self-seed. No gardener could ever plant with the grace with which plants group themselves and it’s often more useful to get the atmosphere of a container right rather than a prescribed planting plan.

How to achieve the look

Despite the flamboyance of the bronze vase, I didn’t want it to make a grand announcement, but rather provide an unpretentious and generous welcome. Just as I love seeing fallen petals beneath a flower arrangement, I wanted the same feeling here. To achieve this I restricted planting within the vase to the rich-pink Glandularia ‘Sissinghurst’, an old cultivar that was given to the gardeners here at Sissinghurst in the mid 1970s and later named after the garden, but I’ve also encouraged the self seeding of both Alcea rugosa and Erigeron karvinskianus beneath and around the urn.

The Glandularia has been delighting our visitors since we planted it in early May with its fantastic lightly scrambling shoots each topped with pink flowers. Last season I planted it in terracotta pots in tandem with the violet-blue Heliotropium arborescens ‘Princess Marina’, a combination that provided colour and great scent throughout the whole summer.

The colour is cooled by the hollyhock, Alcea rugosa. Although short-lived, hollyhocks freely self-seed if spent flower spikes are left in place, and can establish colonies in the garden that persist for years. These self-sown seedlings I find far preferable to those planted in a border as the sparseness of the foliage around them means they’re less susceptible to rust. This pale-yellow-flowered species with fig leaf-shaped foliage, is a longer-lived perennial and less prone to rust.