Purple reigns
Steven Desmond marvels at the mauve magnificence of that great staple of the autumn border, the Michaelmas daisy
The magnificent Michaelmas daisy is a star of the autumn border, says Steven Desmond
IT’S quite a shock to walk into Old Court Nurseries in Worcestershire for the first time. Autumn is famously the time to visit this shrine of the Michaelmas daisy and the human brain is simply unprepared for the floral brilliance everywhere in evidence. It’s a visual feast of lilac in every variation and an object lesson for every gardener, however experienced. There really is no end of beauty to be discovered in this world if we simply keep looking.
It shouldn’t be such a surprise, of course. The Michaelmas daisy and its friends and relations, most of which used to inhabit the genus Aster (read on for further shocks), are the floral equivalents of our great aunts. They are the very image of the Edwardian garden, the star turns of that golden age.
Ballard determined that the Michaelmas daisy was to be the plant of the moment
The story of how they rose to prominence is marvellous in itself. The key to understanding the phenomenon is that, although lilac is now a fashionable colour, it was equally so a century ago—except that, then, it was called mauve.
The Michaelmas daisy, a wildflower of damp places across North America, had been cultivated in this country since the early 18th century without causing much of a sensation. All that was to change as the result of a chance industrial discovery in 1856.
The banks of violet, lilac and mauve rise and fall in a sort of controlled riot of order and beauty
In that year, a young trainee chemist named William Henry Perkin was on his Easter holiday at his family home in the East End of London. He had fashioned a makeshift laboratory on the top floor, where he carried out a series of rather hopeful experiments in an effort to produce a synthetic form of quinine. This, he felt sure, would make him famous as the conqueror of malaria.
All his experiments were utter failures. As he washed out one container, however, he noticed that the black and useless contents ran a beautiful violet colour down the sink. Without meaning to, Perkin had invented the world’s first artificial dye: Mauveine.
He patented it and got it into commercial production with amazing speed and was the instant toast of Europe. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to wear Perkin’s new wonder washable mauve. The colour proved so universally popular that it began to appear on an immense range of decorative objects. Surely, it could not be long before it adorned the flower border.
In fact, it took half a century before this happened, but the effect, once begun, was enduring. In 1906, the same year Sir William Perkin FRS was finally knighted, Ernest Ballard started a nursery at Colwall, on the south-western flank of the Malvern Hills on the Worcestershire/herefordshire border.
Ballard wisely reasoned that mauve flowers would sell and set about breeding improved versions of the Michaelmas daisy.
His intervention, as was Perkin’s 50 years earlier, was superbly timely. Ballard was not the first to whom the Michaelmas daisy had appealed, but he correctly determined that it was to be the plant of the moment and chose it as his specialism. He was right, and the nursery he founded flourishes to this day, of which more anon.
When Gertrude Jekyll published her enduringly popular book Colour Schemes for the Flower Garden in 1908, she was afloat on a Country Life-fuelled rising tide of national esteem as an arbiter of garden taste. The Michaelmas daisy runs through the book like a mauve ribbon.
Miss Jekyll had at least two Michaelmasdaisy borders at her Munstead Wood home, one for the early forms in September and a double border for the main flush in October. These are illustrated in the book by Miss Jekyll’s own photographs and plans. Repeated use is made of one form under the name Munstead Purple. Clearly, the race was on.
As early as 1900, Miss Jekyll’s friend Helen Allingham had painted that double border, showing a tall, billowing mass of flowers ranging in colour from white through palegreyish lilacs to bright pink, a vision of lateseason subtle harmony ideally suited to its creator’s famously blurry eyesight.
Among the early triumphs of the plant breeder in this department was Aster amel
lus King George, which is still a list leader today. It’s a little unnerving to reflect that its breeder, Amos Perry, was minded to name it Kaiser William when he introduced it to his catalogue in 1914, but allowed himself to be persuaded that, given the way events were moving, King George might be a safer bet. He was right. What a marvellous thing hindsight is!
When the war ended in 1918, another nurseryman, Carl Ludwig Frikart, working in the safety of Switzerland, was busy crossing Aster amellus with its near relation
Aster thomsonii and reviewing the resultant seedlings. Such an exercise is, as anyone who’s tried it will confirm, largely (and often entirely) thankless, but, now and again, something thrilling shows its face—and so it was in this instance. Frikart came up with a series of promising garden flowers and named one of them Aster x frikartii Mönch.
For years, I wondered idly why this enduring garden favourite had been given the German word for a monk as its cultivar name—i could see nothing monastic
about it. However, when I learnt that Frikart’s other selections included Jungfrau and Eiger, all became clear. He was naming them after the mountain peaks of his native country.
Aster x frikartii Mönch is one of the great garden plants of our time. Like so many of its genus, it’s at its peak when everything else is thinking of packing up for winter, so it’s always a welcome guest. It’s also a perpetual picture of health, giving the lie to the idea that Michaelmas daisies are martyrs to mildew. Its vigour is equally unquestioned: I don’t need to plant it in my garden, as it’s pleasantly spread in from next door in exactly the right spot. No less an authority than Graham Stuart Thomas thought it was ‘not only the finest perennial aster; it is one of the six best plants, and should be in every garden’.
Admirers of herbaceous perennials will have noticed that many other favourites bear German names, due to the wonderful breeding work done over the years in that country. My own hero in that field is the late Karl Foerster, who, in 1956—the year I was born—added Aster amellus Veilchenkönigin to his Potsdam nursery list. Veilchenkönigin translates neatly as Violet
Queen and the plant remains another exemplary choice for the autumn garden.
The Michaelmas daisy was, until recently, assigned to the genus Aster, readily memorable and, indeed, the type genus of the family Asteraceae, which includes all those star-shaped flowers, such as the daisy, the chrysanthemum and the dahlia.
A modern revision of the genus has, however, subdivided it into several separate names and some of our present favourites now find themselves lumbered with the new genus Symphyotrichum. I have a feeling the new moniker may not catch on.
Let us now return to the pleasant world of Old Court Nurseries. Apart from the wonder of the autumn borders here, there are many other reasons to visit. Not the least of these is the lovely situation of the nursery, gazing west across Herefordshire towards the mountains of Wales from the very foot of the Malvern Hills.
The whole place is a proper gardener’s delight. First-class craftsmanship is in evidence everywhere and there is a satisfying sense of continuity. When the founder Ballard died in 1952, his manager, Percy Picton, carried the business on.
In time, his son, Paul, brought things carefully up to date by forming the Picton Garden at the end of the plot, so that customers could see the plants in the right context, as well as in labelled nursery rows.
Paul and his wife, Meriel, also took the logical step of assembling the National Collection of Autumn Flowering Asters here, so that every pilgrim—and, indeed, every curious novice—might know where best to direct their tread.
The nursery is now in the capable hands of their daughter, Helen, the personification of friendly horticultural expertise. This kind of inheritance can be often be a burden and thus end in failure, but anyone who has seen Helen and her father—and now her husband, Ross Barbour—at work in the nursery can instantly dismiss that notion from their mind.
Around them, the banks of violet, lilac and mauve rise and fall on every side in a sort of controlled riot of order and beauty. When love and skill work together, expect a masterpiece.
The Picton Garden and Old Court Nurseries, Walwyn Road, Colwall, Malvern, Worcestershire (01684 540416; www. autumnasters.co.uk)