Fleeting beauties
Blink and you might just miss these flash-in-the-pan flowers.
Blink and you’ll miss these pretty blooms, says Lynda Hallinan.
A watched pot doesn't boil and a watched plant doesn't bloom. especially if th plat in question is a Portuguese parsnip palm.
They say that good things come to those who wait, but have you noticed how short on detail this old adage is? Be patient, it implies, and you'll eventually get what you want, though it is anyone's guess how long are you expected to twiddle your thumbs for.
I waited, patiently at first, and less patiently as the months dragged on, for over three years for my inaugural black parsley tree or parsnip palm, Melanoselinum decipiens, to unfurl its impressive umbelliferus blooms and wow my garden visitors.
Melanoselinum decipiens is a knockyour-socks-off sort of plant and, with that in mind, I'd strategically located it for maximum bragging rights, bedding it in at the front of the long border along one side of our lawn, where it could hold its head high above a glossy holly hedge.
Also known as giant non-stinging hogweed and cow parsley (not the noxious species), Melanoselinum
decipiens is a plant with impeccable credentials. It comes from Madeira off the coast of Portugal but I first saw it flourishing at Great Dixter, the late, great Christopher Lloyd's garden in East Sussex. Great Dixter's staff have it listed for sale in their nursery as “an impressive monocarp with large evergreen, angelica-like leaves held on curiously nodded stems”. I've also spied it rising dramatically through the riotous jungle of herbs and other edibles in Robert Guyton's food forest in Southland.
I assumed this magnificent beast was an overbearing biennial because
Melanoselinum decipiens spends its first year growing nothing but leaves. Imagine a giant celery bush crossed with Italian parsley on steroids, but with a single, sturdy, palm-like trunk ringed with the scars of fallen leaves.
When sufficiently mature, it erupts into bloom, smothering the arching foliage with a mop-top of starburst blooms in pink and white. After that it dies but not before it scatters fertile seed over the soil below to ensure an encore performance.
In 2015, I planted my first parsnip palm with an eye on the Franklin Hospice Garden Ramble scheduled for the following spring. Those garden ramblers came and went but my parsnip palm refused to perform.
Throughout 2017, the plot didn't thicken much, even if its trunk did. Soon its stalk was as fat as a softball bat and its shiny, frond-like leaves did indeed resemble some sort of squat subtropical palm, but still, there were no flowers to speak of.
Never mind, I thought. Surely it will do its thing for the 2018 Heroic Garden Festival. Wrong again. The festivalgoers came and went with no praise for my bashful parsnip palm.
Then in September this year, we all went overseas for a month. Yes, you guessed it. A week after we departed, the jolly thing rocketed into bloom. (Fortuitously my friend Fiona, tasked with keeping the weeds at bay while we were away, got her camera out to photograph its official unveiling.
Like many oversized umbellifers, including dill, fennel, wild carrot and culinary angelica (see page 77), Melanoselinum decipiens is at least captivating at all stages of bloom. Even when the tiny petals fall, its large pom-pom seedheads are no less intriguing. (Plants are available from Peter Cave Nursery in Raglan, Seaflowers Nursery in Thames and Puriri Lane Nursery in Drury.)