EXPERIMENT WITH ENTICIN

Ihad always considered geums to be bit-part actors in the garden, rather than the megastars, but I am now having a change of heart. New plants are coming in all the time, and a recent one introduced by Rosie Hardy of Hardy’s (hardysplants.co.uk) at Chelsea 2010, Geum ‘Totally Tangerine’, has such presence that I am revising my ideas. It is relatively tall, 90cm (35in) high, and produces tangerine-coloured flowers from April to September – an impressive 22 weeks. It is both sensational and useful. With their neat habit and evergreen foliage (disease-free and hated by slugs and snails), these are ideal, hard-working plants to fill the lower layers. Hard-working and useful could imply boring, but with their palette of white, pink, red, orange and yellow, these easy-to-use plants can really spike up your colour credentials and “lift” the garden. There are fiery oranges (such as G. ‘Prinses Juliana’ which is 60cm/24in tall) to jostle among the juicy greens of euphorbias, or perhaps a sea of G. ‘Mai Tai’ (the pale pink flushed apricot flowers 45cm/18in high) with the purples of alliums poking up through them. Or the coppery orange of Geum ‘Mandarin’ (60cm/24in) coming above a cloud of forget-me-nots. Sue Martin started growing geums about 12 years ago at her garden, Brickwall Cottage. When she suggested that a gardening friend should come and see her geums she got a blank look. Today we have switched on to them, but not many realise that there are hundreds of different ones, enabling you to flex your colour schemes accordingly. The rivale types, such as Geum rivale ‘Album’ (white) and G. rivale ‘Leonard’s Variety’ (rose coloured) spread by rhizomes, are lower growing (to 30cm/12in) and like shade or semi-shade. They are perfect for lightening a bosky area but need a fairly moistureretentive soil. The other geums (broadly the coccineum and chiloense cultivars) are clump formers. The chiloense hybrids (the species chiloense comes from an island off Chile) tolerate sun or semi-shade; they have tall, strong stems with large, mainly double flowers and a long flowering time. The well known, orange- red ‘Mrs J Bradshaw’ and less well known but excellent, copper-orange ‘Rijnstroom’ are examples. The coccineum hybrids are similar to the chiloense hybrids but are slightly shorter. Geum ‘Borisii’ with its single orange flowers just 30cm (12in) high is a classic, and G. ‘Mango Lassi’ (a similar height) with its striking mango/apricot/buff apparel twins well with blues. Sue’s garden at Frittenden in Kent is on heavy clay. It is a romantic cottage garden full of jostling plants that hang together well. Although it is stuffed full of different plants in the quarter-acre plot, it has the feel and look of a garden to enjoy rather than a collection of plants. Geums are satisfying plants to garden because of their robust nature. They do need some care though, in that they definitely benefit from division, otherwise they become short-lived. Deciding when you should divide is easy: it is when they become “doughnut-like” (as Rosie Hardy puts it). That is, the ring doughnut – bare in the centre with the growth limited to the outside. This may occur within a couple of years, then lifting the clump and taking the vigorously growing plants on the outside and replanting is necessary. If you are wanting to increase your population, basal cuttings taken in early spring is the best way, the majority root easily. Many gardeners like to cover every square inch of soil and geums are excellent weed suppressors. Ideally if your soil