■ MORE than one in ten cars sold last year were electrified, new figures from motor manufacturers revealed this week.
Cheer up your midwinter plot with carpets of bright blooms
While sales of electric cars soared nearly threefold, those of diesels nearly halved against a near 30 per cent drop in overall sales to 1.63 million blamed on the pandemic. Pure electric car sales soared from 37,850 to 108,205, taking their market share from 1.6 per cent to 6.6 per cent. Plug-in hybrid sales nearly doubled from 34,984 to 66,877, with market share rising to 4.1 per cent.
Top seller for the year was the Fiesta (pictured), followed by the Vauxhall Corsa.
During midwinter, it’s not easy to make a garden look pretty. Trees, evergreens and structural features help to relieve the dullness. But let’s face it, January is a downbeat month. That’s why winter-flowering plants — however small — are so precious. The most welcome are bulbs such as snowdrops and aconites. They can create carpets of white and gold, shining beneath trees or among shrubs.
Beds and borders are more difficult to plant for winter. Summer perennials are severed stumps, now with nothing attractive to offer. But there are several low plants whose winter leaves or off- season flowers can look beautiful from midwinter onwards.
Many have spring flowers, too. Bergenias are the most rugged with large, leathery leaves. These are evergreen, many turning coppery-purple in winter.
One of the best, Bergenia Abendglut has dark bronze winter leaves. Startling pink flower buds show colour at winter’s end. Then, as the spring advances, the stems lengthen to finish with a dazzling show.
Bergenia Beethoven has lighter bronze leaves with pink flowers. There are also white-flowered varieties such as B. Silberlicht. Bergenias thrive in sun or semi-shade. To propagate, pull rhizomes off mature plants, trim off the old leaves and re-plant.
MERGING SEASONS
i grOW bergenias on a partshaded bank. Welsh poppies, Meconopsis cambrica , seed freely among them to provide lemon-yellow June flowers.
Bergenias may be too coarselooking for some tastes. Lungworts, however, have soft, stippled leaves which look charming almost all year. related to forget-me-nots, their foliage can be decorated with silver-grey spots or stipples. Some have all-silver leaves, with green margins.
Preferring partial shade, some varieties make excellent ground cover. From early spring, sprays of small, but intensely colourful flowers are carried above the copious foliage.
Known as ‘soldiers and sailors’, Pulmonaria officinalis has pink flowers which turn blue as they age. There are also varieties with white, pink or deep blue flowers.
Among named varieties, narrow-leaved Silver Bouquet has pale silver-grey leaves. More robust, Lewis Palmer has spotted leaves and predominantly blue flowers.
The flowers of plain greenleaved P. r ubra are all pink. in contrast, P. saccharata Argentea group have silver-grey foliage.
After flowering, pulmonarias can succumb to mildew. You can reduce that by cutting the plants back to ground level in late spring. The reward for such brutality is a shock of pristine summer foliage.
SHADY LADIES
PULMONARIAS grow wild along woodland margins in Europe and Asia. Partial shade suits them best. For denser shade, the related Brunnera macrophylla has terrific garden value. Also known as Siberian bugloss, this perennial has big, heart-shaped leaves which form an attractive shallow dome.
Those last all summer and through early winter. in spring, forget-me-not flowers create a blue mist, above new foliage.
The common species has plain green leaves. But some are silvergrey or variegated. i use Brunnera as ground cover beneath lilacs and leggy shrubs.
They share the ground with early narcissus and wild daffodils. When those are over, their dying aftermath disappears beneath a carpet of bold brunnera leaves..