Superstar salvias
Coming back to the car park from the dentist in Torrington, there are several small raised beds, all tended to and originally planted, I think, by gardeners from RHS Rosemoor, which is just down the road. It’s been interesting to see what’s kept going in this summer’s sizzling heat. On a recent visit, the plant that truly sparkled among the silvers and glaucous greys of helichrysum and lavender was a salvia with small but brilliant magenta flowers. There are so many of these shrubby salvias around and so many new hybrids released each and every year, I wouldn’t like to hazard a guess at exactly which this was. In the garden here we have several, used mainly in containers. It would be difficult to incorporate them in the general melee of our beds and borders, where their dense habit and twiggy growth might look at odds. Some of the larger species and varieties, though, can hold their own in parts of the garden that tend to become a general free-for-all at this time of year. Chief among these is salvia ‘Amistad’. This year for our Channel 5 programme, Spring Gardening with Carol Klein, we bought two new plants of ‘Amistad’ as replacements for two we thought had been lost the previous winter. It’s not the hardiest of salvias by any means and needs a sheltered spot. To my absolute glee, in July, the two original plants showed themselves in our little potager bed and are now a couple of feet high. The most exciting outcome of this story is I can now take cuttings from these plants to have more next year with which to experiment in different places.