CHELSEA’S NEW PLAYERS
EVERY year at the Chelsea Flower Show, garden designers strut their stuff on the Main Avenue and the Great Pavilion is filled with the heady scent of exhibition flowers at their finest.
The annual celebration of all things gardening is also a showcase for new plants and celebrates the work of breeders and nurseries who strive to produce plants that will perform better in our gardens.
This year, there were new variations on old garden favourites from roses to clematis to wall flowers. Here’s what caught my eye.
Raymond Evison is simply Mr Clematis – there’s nothing he doesn’t know about this species and he’s been growing and cultivating them in sunny Guernsey since 1985, earning him an OBE from the late Queen Elizabeth II as well as countless gold medals at the Chelsea Flower Show.
Over the last six decades he has introduced more than 100 new clematis cultivars and this year he brought us ‘Tumaini’ a beautiful free-flowering variety that has large light violet petals with a complementary dark pink. Its compact nature makes it suitable for containers and borders, reflecting Raymond’s interest in developing cultivars suitable for smaller gardens.
I had the pleasure of meeting Raymond many years ago and his advice about clematis is worth repeating. He recommended growing them through other plant material – “don’t grow them just on a trellis, grow them with roses, through other evergreen walltrained shrubs, or low growing bushes.
“Always plant other plants around the root systems – this then gives them a cool root run. Clematis love to grow in a microclimate with other plants, as they do in the wild, in places like China or Japan.
“Keep them well watered and feed with rose or tomato fertiliser. Plant the deep-coloured flowered clematis in the sun, plant the pale ones in the shade.”
David Austin Roses has an equally distinguished reputation and a long-standing heritage of breeding new rose varieties that have the benefits of today – better disease resistance and free flowering – while retaining the romance and fragrance of an old English rose.
This year they introduced ‘Dannahue’, an English shrub rose with apricot blooms that have a zesty fragrance with notes of lemon, lychees and apricot. Repeat flowering and ideal for containers and shady areas, it’s named after Danny Clarke, who I had the pleasure of working with a couple of years ago on Channel 5’s Filthy Gardens SOS. He co-directs Grow to Know, which is committed to bringing horticulture to diverse communities and will receive £10,000 from the sales of this rose.
Geums are usually one of the first herbaceous perennials to flower, bringing a very welcome bright spark of orange to the garden. Geum ‘Orange Pumpkin’ has been bred by Green Globe and is one of the first fully doubleflowering geums.
The petals are a frilly mixture of orange and yellow, and like other geums, this one is easy to grow and will flower throughout the summer.
Flowers that perform all summer long are always good value and it makes sense to include some in your planting schemes to maintain pops of colour while other plants burst into flower but quickly die away.
Wallflowers are a good option – the perennial Erysimum Bowles’ Mauve for example can start as early as March and keep going until October.
Sow Successful Limited has a new variety called ‘Taffeta’, a highly fragrant new series of double wallflowers that will start blossoming as early as February.