Spice invaders!
Fabulously exotic ginger lilies are natives of Asia – but they’ve conquered the entire gardening world
EARLIER this year I visited a friend’s nursery the day after he had received a massive shipment of bulbs, corms, tubers and rhizomes from China. As he was struggling to deal with the perishable material on his own, I offered to help pot some of the exotic treasures.
Inside one of the wooden crates were Hedychium coronarium – white ginger lilies. The bizarre-looking knobbly roots were 10in long and as thick as my wrist.
Yet, these unsightly structures undergo a dramatic transformation over the course of a few months. Shoots emerge from red buds in late spring and extend rapidly upwards. In early autumn, the 6ft leafy stems are topped with heavily scented, creamy white blooms shaped like butterflies.
As their common name suggests, these lateseason beauties are closely related to edible ginger. The ornamental types are native to Asia but are naturalised in many other parts of the world. For example, Hedychium coronarium is actually from the Himalayas. It was introduced to Cuba in the 19th Century and is now so widespread that it has become the national flower of the Caribbean island. The blooms of this and other ginger lilies are also strung together in traditional Hawaiian garlands.
Despite their far-flung origins, ginger lilies are much tougher than you might think. Most are hardy to -10C, and are happy to be grown outdoors in just about any type of garden. Only a few require the protection of a greenhouse or conservatory.
Ginger lilies tend to form large, cylindrical flower heads made up of lots of individual blooms. Flowers come in shades of white, yellow, orange, red and pink, often interspersed with long stamens in contrasting colours. These are carried on stems clothed with lance-shaped leaves.
Hedychium ‘Helen Dillon’ is considered the easiest ginger lily to grow. It’s a vigorous beast that will form large clumps of 5ft stems clothed with glossy green foliage and loose heads of pure white flowers. Alas, it has little or no scent. At the other end of the olfactory scale, H. densiflorum has slender orange spikes in late summer that pack a real punch, while the loose flower heads of peachy ‘Pink Flame’ are equally potent. Several varieties were introduced by Tony Schilling, a former curator of the garden at Wakehurst Place, West Sussex, including H. ‘Tara’, which boasts 4ft stems with orange flowers. And one of the showiest is H. gardnerianum, a species that arrived in Britain from India in 1829. The plant boasts dense spikes of yellow flowers from August until October. Ginger lilies like just about any kind of soil, as long as it’s moist, fertile and welldrained. They are happy in semi-shade but tend to perform better when given a warm, sunny spot. For my money, they make the most impact when planted in groups of three to five with other exotica, such as cannas, hardy bananas and tetrapanax. Another option is to set them among lateflowering perennials in a bed or raise them in large containers on a patio.