GENEROUS WELCOME
This bronze urn is one of several given to Sissinghurst’s creator, Vita Sackville-West, by her mother in 1932. It once stood in the Parc de Bagatelle in Paris and deserves to be main star of this display. 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 stick rigidly to 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 verbena, 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.
Every year, the verbena delights visitors with its fantastic lightly scrambling shoots, each topped with pink flowers. I have previously planted it in terracotta pots in tandem with the violet-blue Heliotropium arborescens ‘Princess Marina’, a wonderful combination that provides colour and great scent throughout the whole summer. Here the colour is cooled by the hollyhock, Alcea rugosa. Although they are 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. I find these self-sown seedlings 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 figleaf-shaped foliage, is a longer-lived perennial and less prone to rust.