HINT OF HAUNTED HOLLY
‘Ghostly’ garden options give a delightful glow to autumn borders
We HaVe a ghost in our garden. Dressed in silvery grey, she neither speaks nor wails and I’ve never seen her walk. I know she can move because she turns up in a different spot each year.
unlike your average phantom, she’s a summer ghost. We see her in July twilight — shimmering among the border plants.
In life, her name was miss ellen Willmott, an erudite plantswoman who died in 1934, aged 76. a shocker for long-lasting rows, miss Willmott even snubbed the rHs on receiving its highest award, the Victoria medal of Honour, refusing to attend the investiture in 1897.
‘miss Willmott’s ghost’ is a pretty but invasive annual sea holly, eryngium giganteum.
Growing a metre tall, the stems, flowers and holly-like leaves are ghostly silver-grey which almost glow in the twilight.
On garden visits, miss Willmott would craftily scatter their seeds about when no one was looking. rival gardeners later discovered the alien plants, shining spookily in the twilight.
TURNIP LANTERNS
mODerN Halloween comes from the u.s. In my 1950s boyhood, we neither tricked nor treated. No one grew or bought pumpkins, so we never ate pumpkin pie or toasted the seeds. But we made terrific Jack-o’-lanterns.
For those we used turnips — huge ones called mangolds. like giant beets, also called mangolds or wurzels, they were grown as an agricultural crop in fields as winter feed for cattle.
With a sharp knife, you could hollow out and craft a mangold into a death’s head with ease, or persuade your dad to do it. We set our lanterns up for Halloween and kept them for Bonfire Night, too. They became ghostly witnesses of Guy Fawkes’ execution by bonfire.
You could grow mangolds in a garden, but the seeds are hard to buy in tiny quantities, unlike garden turnip seeds.
For gentle flavours, choose white-fleshed varieties. But if you eat haggis, orange-fleshed swedes and creamy Desirée potatoes are perfect for the traditional accompaniment of ‘neeps and tatties’.
STINKY SPECTRE
Our rarest and weirdest wild plant is ghost orchid, epipogium aphyllum. living on soil-born fungi, most of the leafless plant stays below ground.
There may be no sign of the plant above ground for years. Flowers appear only when stress triggers it to produce seed. The frail, short-stemmed blooms are pale, yellowish-pink.
The North american corpse plant, Monotropa uniflora, also lives on soil fungi. Its naked white flowers appear in clumps.
The nearest thing to a corpse in my garden is dragon arum, dracunculus vulgaris. Native to the eastern mediterranean, this has large, handsome foliage.
In late spring or early summer, waist-high stems develop, each carrying a huge, neatly packed spathe. That unfurls in warm weather becoming a huge, deep maroon spathe with rather suggestive central spikes.
When mature, the flower gives off a stench of rotting meat to attract pollinators — carrionfeeding insects like blow-flies.
I planted a dragon arum too near our clothes line. so anyone hanging out washing in June experiences the eye-watering stink. mrs C is not pleased.