The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Saturday
PLANTS THAT LIKE THE SHADE
Plants & Places Take a tip from nature and use these four spring-flowering plants to add some colour under trees, says Matt Collins
Make way anemones! Move aside ye brightening primulas! Even, dare I say it, move aside bluebells (heresy!): spring cometh to the wood in shades yet more beautiful. Last year, in an act of general horticultural enquiry, I trialled a number of early-flowering perennials in pots within the Garden Museum’s courtyard, interested to explore attractive alternatives to spring’s usual suspects.
The enquiry was inspired in equal measure by two jaunts I’d taken the previous year; hiking a European beech forest underlit by curious petals, and a tramp through Beth Chatto’s woodland garden, which visitors explore during the early part of the year as a glittering cavern of strange jewels.
The majority of my guinea-pig plants were therefore almost all forest fancies, dwellers of the damp understorey with flowers that have evolved to shine in that rejuvenating window between the last frosts and the unfurling canopy above: dicentra, vancouveria and maianthemum; cardamines and corydalis.
I chose the shady end of the courtyard overhung by a dark mulberry, perching pots atop the even platform of an elevated ledger-stone for its uniform background grey. To maintain impartiality, plants were potted into the unassuming terracotta of threeand four-litre “long tom” containers, mixing woodchip into the potting mix for improved water retention. Loosely gathered and let be, my artificial woodland would soon awaken.
First to impress was pink, tubular Corydalis solida, which I have written about in this column before; an earlyrising and electric species among the many varieties of fumewort. This was followed by graceful, arching creamwhite blooms belonging to Dicentra formosa ‘Aurora’, a fern-leafed ‘bleeding heart’ faintly blushing at the flower tip. Both being members of the poppy family, the foliage offered as much interest as the flowers: airy, tiered and with a glaucous tint.
Yet another welcome surprise was Vancouveria hexandra, a Pacific Northwestener named after Captain
George Vancouver of HMS Discovery, who gained his namesake navigating up the Georgia Strait in the late 18th century. He is buried close to a garden I once maintained, and I used to pass his grave on lunch breaks in the quiet churchyard at Petersham, Richmond (a stone’s throw from Petersham Nurseries – also a lunchtime haunt), and wonder how so accomplished an adventurer landed such a diminutive grave.
Diminutive might also describe Vancouveria hexandra, although this would be playing the plant down. Its squaredoff, ivy-like leaves are enchanting for a start; by mid April last year they were spreading low and feathery, rivalling the fronds of maidenhair fern for daintiness and almost any epimedium – its better known Berberidaceae cousin – for freshness of spring foliage (picture the floaty leaves of a horizontal thalictrum). The flowers, too, are understated yet captivating: sprays of white stars with petals acutely reflexed, much like an erythronium or cyclamen, leading to the common name “inside-out flower”.
Grown en masse, I can well imagine, these flowers collect into a fantastic ground-cover foam, in addition to providing an effective weed suppressant.
All plants mentioned are united in their foolhardy constitution and shade tolerance. They suit deep pots – particularly beneath sheltering deciduous shrubs like a compact viburnum, hydrangea or Philadelphus coronarius – equally well as a damp and dappled corner of the garden. But the very best among last year’s trialled woodlanders, offering height, foliage, poise and colour, was a new shady favourite: Uvularia grandiflora, or ‘merrybells’ as it is referred to throughout its native eastern North America.
With slender stems and soft, willowy leaves texturally reminiscent of Solomon’s seal, uvularias dangle delicate handkerchiefs of luminous yellow petals that look, quite simply, like nothing else. The drooping habit is mirrored in the foliage to present a fountain paused in motion, and in a few weeks’ time their moment will come again – I cannot wait.
Proven victorious in their “clinical” setting, the uvularias have now graduated to the field, elevated in stature to a prestigious spot within the courtyard planting itself. The spot, as it happens, lies in the shadow of another renowned, somewhat tempestuous seafarer, Captain William Bligh of HMS Bounty fame, who is entombed within the garden (occupying a far grander grave than Vancouver’s, it might be noted). I added five more clumps to this patch, forming a scattered little group for better effect.
For those of the belief that yellow in the garden belongs solely with the daffodils, there is a paler variety of U. grandiflora softened to a hue more akin to ivory. U. grandiflora var. pallida is almost as widely available as the truer form, although, having grown both side by side, in my view the former is slightly lacking – the prominent
Once flowered, the woodlanders will often vanish into the ground until next spring
contrast of sunny yellow on gentle green is what makes merrybells so striking. Lighter still is the species U. sessilifolia, whose elongated creamwhite petals remain bound like an upturned tulip, rather than freely splayed. At around six inches tall it is half the height of the grandifloras, but worth tracking down if woodland curiosities are your thing (I’d be interested to hear if any readers have tried growing it, or better yet, would part with a small clump…).
I wouldn’t have imagined last year, as our uvularias opened to a museum emptied of visitors, that their performance would go unsung for a second spring. Under the guidance for lockdown liftings set out by the government in February, it seems museums and non-commercial galleries – where social distancing is arguably as easily maintained as in gyms and retail outlets – must remain shut a while longer.
International travel, of course, also remains off the cards: no spiriting away to those fabulous European beech woods where wild aquilegias, tall white helleborine orchids and, as I encountered beside a little subalpine Italian stream, bright and big-leafed cardamines crouch. Instead, I will make do with bringing these plants to the garden, emulating, with plenty of organic matter and a mulching of woodchip, conditions befitting their arboreal heritage.
Now is the time to buy these plants – while they are “in the green”. Once flowered, woodlanders will very often vanish below ground, dormant without trace until the following spring. This is in fact one of their signature charms, and allows later-flowering plants to share the space.
A final floral surprise of 2020 was a plant neither potted nor planted. It showed up unannounced in the museum’s front garden, running lilac pink between the ledgers and ferns. To my delight the runner was a cardamine – a rogue bittercress or ‘cuckoo flower’, Cardamine quinquefolia. So many mysterious blooms stalk our garden, a former medieval churchyard, that I tend not to query their arrival much. Four-petalled, like mustard, these flowers remained for close to a month, each stem opening florets in a procession towards its centre. Serendipitous though the cardamine might have been, I’m counting it among the trial’s successes – if you’re looking to lighten deepest shade, this one is a winner.
Of course, I wouldn’t really pit merrybells, the fern-leaf bleeding heart or even cuckoo flower against the noble bluebell, but, to rephrase the nursery rhyme, if I’m going down to the woods (one day), I want to be sure of a big surprise.