Can you give me some ideas for a silver garden?
Nan Wedgwood, by email
Stefan says: Go to the herb section of your garden centre first and you’ll probably be halfway to meeting your needs. Between the culinary and medicinal herbs, there are dozens with more or less a silver appearance. And you’ll find more in the sub-shrub genus artemisia than in most others put together.
There are two plants that surely have the most intense silver of all. The shrubby bindweed, Convolvulus cneorum, is noninvasive, unlike British bindweed, but with the familiar trumpetshaped flowers and foliage as close to real silver as any you’ll see. And then to an annual, not one with silver leaves or flowers, but with silver fruits. The common honesty, lunaria, is so familiar and so much used by generations of flower arrangers that we can tend to overlook it. You’ll have to suffer the purple flowers but those fruits are truly silver.