Taking shape
Choosing plants isn’t just about colour – the weird and wonderful deserve a place among your planting too, says Julia Atkinson-Dunn.
Afew years ago, in my initial energetic burst of enthusiasm for this gardening business, I bought the book Brilliant and Wild – A Garden from Scratch in a Year, by Lucy Bellamy.
As if the name wasn’t enticing enough, at the time, Bellamy was also the editor of Gardens Illustrated, a go-to for international gardening inspiration with a naturalistic bent.
In compiling lists of fabulous and unusual plants, she divided them into chapters based on their flowering forms, further encouraging readers to choose from each to make a richlytextured garden beyond selecting just on colour.
I found Bellamy’s breakdown an accessible approach as a beginner, compartmentalising and making sense of what always felt like an overwhelming menu of options when curating for my own garden.
Reflecting on the much-appreciated angle she offered, I’ve been thinking about the interesting plants I have added and investigated with their distinctive form in mind.
While there is no escaping my attraction to softness, I have found the addition of, in Bellamy’s words, ‘‘dots, panicles and spikes’’ among bushier specimens offers a sense of whimsy that brings the desired informal vibe to an urban space.
With a focus on my summer and autumn perennial display, plants like echinacea, rudbeckia, Japanese anemones, scabiosa, geum and knautia have long been my favourite ways to introduce dots of colour to my beds.
Their bright and bold flowers float through the longer stems in the garden and provide beautiful anchors for the eye.
Also, my self-seeded crop of asters down in the back bed, with their tiny mauve flowers, have been most welcome this autumn – even if the plants themselves collapse to the ground at any given chance.
To continue to push myself beyond what I am used to, I have recently added Coreopsis verticillata ‘‘Moonbeam’’ into the mix, with its delicate daisy shaped blooms in a glowing lemon. The hunt is on too, for just the right echinops and eryngium varieties to sprinkle around. Their prickly, thistle-like heads offer a playful juxtaposition to the softness around them.
More delicate in nature to the plants above, are the array of panicle headed options I have very much enjoyed. These are plants whose heads are made up of many tiny flowers to be read as a single bloom, throwing out their magic on slim stems. As mentioned many a time before I have a particular love of tall, architectural Verbena bonariensis and its long flowering puffs of violet that are heavenly for butterflies.
With similar tones, its lower growing cousin Verbena rigida loves to weave through others at a lower level.
Sanguisorba has perhaps been my favourite addition in the last few years and I have experimented with two varieties. Sanguisorba obtusa with its crazy, fluffy pink blooms that distinctly remind me of the childhood TV show Fraggle Rock, and my favourite, Sanguisorba officinalis and its spray of small rusty bullets atop towering stems.
In early and mid-summer there is also no escaping the glory of Thalictrum delavayi ‘‘Hewitt’s Double’’. Its scopey height and enthusiastic flowering create the illusion of pink smoke against my dark fence. I have two other thalictrum varieties that are shorter growing, but equally delicious.
Then we have the spikes of my garden. Perhaps the most pronounced is tough Phlomis russeliana, with its broad upright stems dotted with evenly spaced balls that move from acid green to yellow petals and dried sculptural forms in winter. My eyes have recently been opened to the other attractive varieties of this plant, and I am now on the lookout for the pink-petaled Phlomis tuberosa. They are so weird and wonderful amid finer plants.
Lower-growing veronica has been a little challenging, because it succumbs to powdery mildew but, with each year, my plants mature in size and the lovely long spires have become a valued feature at the edges of my border. Other notables are astilbes and the wonky tops of Gooseneck Loosestrife, both of which thrive in shadier spots.
Very popular, and rightfully so, are the use of salvias in the garden. Aside from my healthy crop of Salvia uliganosa mass planted on a bright corner, previously I haven’t had much luck in growing salvia, likely because I put the right plant in the wrong place. But this is set to change as I begin by dipping my toe into this enormous genus with the introduction of Salvia greggii ‘‘Salmon Dance’’.
Lastly, thanks to some generously gifted plants, I am making the risky move of dotting the strong clumps of Sisyrinchium striatum through some other very gentle forms. With its sword-like leaves and strong stems adorned with clusters of soft yellow flowers in late spring/early summer, I feel it will be immediately evident if they are going to be friends with their neighbours or not. Nothing like a garden jigsaw puzzle to solve.
And as I look out into my fading garden now, it’s the seed heads and stalks of these mentioned plants that bring a ghostly, structural character amid the dismal melt of my dahlias. Their extraordinary little shapes enable a continued interest in the garden, until I tidy it all up.