Carol Klein on why euphorbias are the spring sensations
Spectacular euphorbias are taking centre stage now – and it’s the right time to take some cuttings
‘Their startling heads of luminous lime-green light up the garden for months on end’
If you saw the garden here at Glebe Cottage as an abstract picture, simplified to its most essential elements, from mid April through to June, the most outstanding element would be blobs of vivid lime-green, all provided by euphorbias.
There are a series of plants of Euphorbia palustris that run through the ‘hot’ border and across the brick garden. They’re already a couple of feet, around 60cm high, and each day they get brighter.
This spurge is the most spectacular in the garden and some of these plants must be 15 years old, getting bigger and better each year, except for a couple that have more meagre growth this spring. I tend to think that plants will go on and on, but nothing lasts forever, and it might be a good idea to take some cuttings – now is just the right time.
The other variety taking centre stage right now is Euphorbia epithymoides. This is an outstanding spurge which can be put to a hundred uses in
the April garden. One variety,
E. epithymoides ‘Major’ even flowers sporadically in the summer. A plant at the corner of one of our raised beds at the bottom of the garden has a mass of flower heads. Its citricgreen makes a startling contrast to Paeonia mascula with its magenta petals.
Euphorbias are unique. Their startling heads of luminous lime-green light up the garden for months on end. Some clamber over walls, others make bright tussocks in the spring garden, while some make substantial evergreen structures.
Most of the euphorbias we grow in our gardens are versions of wild species. E. amygdaloides, the wood spurge, creates splashes of vivid colour along our hedgerows. It crops up with bluebells, or earlier on with selfseeded honesty escaped from a nearby garden. The combination of magenta-purple with sharp lime-green is worth copying.
There are variations in foliage colour, too. The best of them are essentially purple-leaved, varieties such as E. amygdaloides ‘Purpurea’. E. amygdaloides is our own native wood spurge, an accommodating species that thrives even in dark and shady places, under hedges or among tree roots. E. amygdaloides
robbiae has a running habit, making it an excellent groundcover plant in shade. E. myrsinites thrives best in dry, sunny locations and is at home where it can flop over a dry stone wall. From Turkey and the Middle East, where it grows on arid mountain sides, this spurge has close-packed glaucous leaves, slightly pointed, which spiral around its dangling stems.
E. characias too needs sun and light and thrives in poor soil, where it will often seed itself around prolifically making a sea of 90cm (3ft) stems, clothed in whorls of narrow, blue-green leaves. Although it has greenish bracts with dark centres, its subspecies, E. characias wulfenii, has yellow-green bracts, with yellow flowers within. These magnificent Mediterraneans look best in a gravel garden or among other plants of shorter stature on banks or raised beds.
Although euphorbias themselves have a slightly acrid smell, their flowers often have a sweet perfume. One, E. mellifera,
takes its name from the Latin for honey-bearing. Its flowers are
pleasingly honey-scented. It’s as handsome as any shrub during the summer months and deep into the autumn. Its elegant, vivid green leaves are edged in silver with a white midrib.