YOUR SILVER SERVICE
Fill your borders with these shiny hues — just don’t call them grey
SILVER foliage is in vogue, but don’t assume it’s the latest thing. In the Sixties, Mrs Desmond Underwood’s Colchester nursery specialised in silver or grey-leaved plants. Visitors flocked to see her unique displays of silvery wormwoods, flannel-leaved salvias and soft, grey sages. For colour, she bejewelled all that silver-grey with blue lavenders, pretty pinks or vivid rose campion. Whatever the flowers’ colour of flowers, their leaves had to be silvery.
While green predominates in most gardens, selected leaf tints — gold, purple, variegated — have value as special features.
Mrs Underwood’s wholly silvergrey landscapes were by no means unnatural — arid regions from the Cote d’Azur to the Cape of Good Hope have them. But silver planting schemes can look natural even in rainy Britain.
Silver plants are frequently aromatic, often lovely in flower and have distinctive foliage.
SAGE ADVICE
DESpItE exotic origins, many are hardy in the UK. Most love sun and tolerate drought, but there are silvers for shade, too, and the best show beautifully in low light. Any garden with a sunny corner or south-facing wall is perfect for the silver treatment. You might well already have some, but you can build on that, blending different shades and contrasting silvers with blue-grey, gold or green.
Common lavender has greygreen leaves. But Lavandula
lanata’s silver-white, woolly-textured foliage contrasts well with strongly with darker- toned leaves — green or otherwise.
Broad-leaved and Berggarten sages are richer in colour and bigger and table, Wormwoods are too. in leaf excellent than are most among for others the the most silver- characterful grey plants. and Shrubby varied of Artemisia powis Castle is one of the best with pale filigree leaves. For a perennial border, A. ludoviciana Silver Queen grows tall with oblong silver-white leaves. In a tub, rock garden or small bed, A. schmidtiana Nana develops feathery silver carpets. For leafy harmony, you could put it against a backdrop of blue-green Ruta graveolens or purple-leaf sage.
the ultimate silver is the little shrub Convolvulus
cneorum. the leaves shine like metal among miniature loudspeaker flowers.
BRIGHT IDEAS
AS WItH all planting, more can mean less. Nothing but silvers creates a grey disappointment. But dot bright flowers among the foliage and you’re setting gems in a silver sea.
For spring, crocuses or tulips could colour the silver. the perennial wallflower Erysimum Bowles’s Mauve makes its own show with violet flowers above blue-grey leaves.
pinks have silver-blue leaves, so Mrs Underwood used them widely. Varieties such as Dianthus Claret Joy, salmon and carmine Doris or crimson-laced Lancing Supreme are fragrant and perfect for cutting. try Allwoods ( allwoods. net) for autumn-delivered pinks.
Shade-loving silvers include ferns. Japanese painted fern
Athyrium nipponicum var. pictum, A. Ghost and A. Branford Beauty have almost silverygrey foliage. I contrast those with plain green soft shield fern and entire-leaved hart’s tongue.
Sadly, Mrs Underwood’s book Grey And Silver plants, is long out of print, but second-hand copies are available from suppliers such as AbeBooks ( abebooks.co.uk).