Try high-class horticulture
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OT all the best garden plants are indestructible dead certs. Little treasures simply aren’t suitable for the hurly-burly of the open garden. They get lost in a crowd and have to be actively grown in their own pots to benefit from individual attention.
My favourite little treasures are alpines and over the years I’ve kept a fair collection in a cold frame, grown in long toms – tall, narrow clay pots – or wide, shallow terracotta pans which provide good growing conditions and show them off perfectly.
As each plant peaks I’ll bring it out and put it on show. I stand a single specimen in the middle of a small outdoor table on the terrace and group three or four on a stone slab, stood on a couple of stone walling blocks to make a low “shelf” by the front door.
There are only a few alpines that deserve the Ritz treatment and the best candidates are evergreens with naturally neat, intricately detailed geometric shapes that look their best up close. You don’t need many to create brilliant seasonal displays.
Saxifraga “Tumbling Waters” is a cracker, the dark evergreen foliage of the single, large, flat rosette is studded with showy silver flecks. It flowers just once after several years growth, erupting into a cascade of tiny white foam-like flowers at the ends of 2ft stems then dies leaving small “pups” that you can pot up to start again.
Also strictly symmetrical is Erodium glandulosum which makes a dome of soft, blue-grey feathery foliage 4-6in high from which elegant sprays of tiny, lightly veined pinkish, bluish flowers erupt on long, wiry stems – the whole thing looks like a tiny work of art. Which it is of course.
Houseleeks look best in traditional shallow pans or squat, contemporary containers. They can grow in only an inch of soil. The cobwebbed houseleek (Sempervivum arachnoideum) has clusters of small, soft spiky, pale green rosettes linked together by strange white strands forming precise cobweb patterns but there are lots of named varieties with glaucous blue-grey or glossy reddish purple rosettes, with or without webs.
Saxifrages with small clustering “bodies” also look good grown in pans, try Saxifraga fredericiaugusti ssp grisebachii “Wisley Variety”. It’s a stunner with tight silver and racing-green rosettes, with striking scaly red and green crook-shaped flower stalks in late spring. The actual flowers fade into insignificance by comparison.
And if you want a captivating specimen plant with scent try Daphne odora “Aureomarginata”. It’s a neatly domed dwarf evergreen shrublet with whiteedged leaves and pale pink flowers that emits a scent so powerful you can almost see it. It can reach 5ft high and the same in width but it takes half a lifetime to do so. It’s perfectly happy restricted in a pot and what’s more it’s portable.
Even when you have rolling acres, a few little treasures are invaluable. But for balcony owners, roof gardeners, anyone with dodgy knees or a keen gardener forced to “downsize”, they are a dream.
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