The novelty factor
Wanting what you can’t have is a strange thing – but, luckily for Toby, one pipe dream has become a beautiful reality
STEPS and level changes make a garden feel much bigger – and I should know, as carrying the shopping up through our steep garden is like scaling the Eiger! Just like on the slopes of that perilous berg, any visitors who don’t know their way through the garden find themselves lost as they ascend to the summit or, as some like to call it, ‘the front door’.
Wanting what you can’t have is a natural part of gardening, and while our space-creating terraces, views of the town and country, and steps lined with potted geraniums have been a labour of love, I still hanker for a garden on the flat.
What most gardeners covet, though (myself, included) are those plants that get away from the run-of-the-mill… something a bit different. One of my favourite rarities was given to me by plantsman Ray Brown of Plant World in Devon, which is a good place to start if you’re after a novelty plant.
“Most gardeners covet something a bit different”
It’s a remarkably hardy mini-me cousin of the tropical liana, ‘Dutchman’s Pipe’. Like its supersized relative, my Aristolochia fimbriata’s flowers are shaped like the calabash pipe smoked by Sherlock Holmes, although its blooms (like the three-foot-long stems) are more Action Man in scale!
Their elaborate curly shapes allow them to trap flies, luring them in with a necrotic scent and then locking them behind rows of hairs that, like bars on a prison window, prevent escape. Only when the insects are completely covered in pollen does the flower release the fly from custody, merely to trick and entrap the fly inside another bloom, guaranteeing pollination.
Ray Brown told me it was reasonably hardy, but I didn’t believe him (I didn’t express that at the time!) as the marbled lilypad-like leaves seemed so delicate. It was only when the Beast from the East blew through last winter that I noticed it was still alive and kicking on the patio.
I brought it into the greenhouse and have cherished it ever since, and I grow it like nasturtium as a scrambler alongside pots of summer bedding. However, unlike nasturtium, which will be left to their fate, this particular treasure is going into the greenhouse for the winter to guarantee its safety.