WILD WEEDS
Our garden has never been as colourful as it is right now. In the not-to-distant past this would have horrified me. I’d have spent far too much time worrying about whether that shade of apricot worked with this shade of lavender and wouldn’t it have been better if we’d just stuck to white.
Last summer, though, The Landscaper insisted on filling up the front gardens with a frightening array of pansies, petunias, dianthus, marigolds and other things I’d never heard of, all of which returned with a vengeance this year and transformed our terrace into what is commonly described as ‘a riot of colour’.
Interestingly, I like it. Purple and yellow violas — a colour combination which formerly would have appalled me — are appearing in the cracks between the terrace pavers and I smile every time I see a new one. The pansies in their vintage pinks have thrilled me to bits and even the slightly garish dianthus in the bowl on the plinth are a happy sight.
The only problem is — and isn’t there always a problem? — they’re all useless as cut flowers. But I have found a solution. A wander around the stream bank this morning revealed a slightly different ‘riot of colour’ in the form of weeds, all with colourful flowers, textural seed heads and long stems. Perfect.
For the purpose of this column, I’m defining weeds as ‘anything that got here, uninvited, without being planted’ and that being the case, my No 1 weed is the most intensely purple/blue agapanthus I have ever met. To the chagrin of many plant purists, aggies have had their moment in the sun this year. They’re everywhere in our town, dressing up roadsides, banks, borders and wastelands, and they make fantastic cut flowers. I’ve had a gang of white ones on my kitchen windowsill (aggies are definitely kitchen flowers) for the past week and they’re still looking as fresh as, well, aggies.
I’m also picking Montbretia, a spiky thing with strappy leaves and bright orange flower that appears on the stream bank every year. I’d be negligent if I didn’t mention that it’s classified as a weed and appears on numerous regional council websites with admonitions about how naughty it is. But hey, I didn’t plant it, so what’s a girl to do?
Montbretia is a garden hybrid of C. aurea and C. pottsii, two plants of the genus Crocosmia, and was first bred away back in 1880. It grows from perennial corms that are often spread in garden rubbish, which probably explains why there’s so much of it around.
Like agapanthus, it doesn’t come with stylish foliage, so I strip its leaves off and stuff it in a vase with dill. White agapanthus plays nicely with the verdant foliage of kakabeak.
Then there’s carrot weed, or parsley dropwort, of which there’s an embarrassing amount growing alongside our rubbish pile. It has big, off-white flowers and quite nice foliage of its own, although I think it looks better with real parsley. Sadly it’s an invasive pasture weed, and because animals won’t eat it it can become quite dominant in pastures once it flowers. I’m helping out in this regard by bringing the flowers inside and spraying them with hairspray.
Once I’d have eschewed any plant for the purple palette but The Landscaper’s hebe garden has softened me, and since I can’t pick hebes to bring inside I’m using Verbena bonariensis, or purple top. It is, as you’d expect, purple, with flowers that appear from summer until autumn. It reminds me of the statice we used to hang from our ceiling rafters in dried flower bunches during the hippie era. I don’t do that now (scared of heights) so I show it off in a tall vase with the seedheads of miniature toetoe.
If you don’t have any of the weeds mentioned above, don’t despair. There are more than 2000 species of weed in New Zealand so you’re bound to find something that works for you. Don’t go growing them for that purpose, though, or you’ll be in trouble with the weed police. If you’re not sure what’s a weed and what’s not, visit www.terrain.net.nz. The site gives an alphabetical list of weeds and escapee plants, and you might find quite a few that are masquerading as ornamentals in your own garden.