Cold comforts of flax that can thrive all year
Want a plant to provide a bit of colourful interest throughout the year? Want it to virtually take care of itself, come rain, snow or even worse?
Try a phormium, a New Zealand flax. Don’t be fooled into believing that all are tender greenhouse types which curl up and die at the first sign of an English winter; many are tough individuals and are at home in any garden – even at the seaside where wind and salt-laden air would normally desiccate lesser plants.
Although they like full sun and a fertile, well-drained soil, most are willing to grow just about anywhere, including poorer soils as long as they are kept fed with a nitrogenbased fertiliser because these are greedy plants.
Old, untidy leaves can be cut off. And if you do grow it in a tub or pot, it should
never get too big for its roots. But it pays to give them a little help – apply a hefty mulch of peat, leafmould, leaves or bark around the base of plants.
Propagate by division in early spring – dig around the plant and pull away some of the healthy side-shoots. If they are a bit too small to be replanted directly into the garden, pot them up and keep them in a greenhouse until they look big enough to take on the outside world.
Despite their somewhat exotic appearance, phormiums are relatively easy plants to grow and they will repay the gardener’s trust by producing stunning leaves – the range of colours varies widely among varieties.
Phormium ‘Maori Queen’, for example, has broad, bronze-green leaves with rosered margins, and a sliver of cream at the edge. In hot summers, a spike of tubular, red flowers will shoot up from the centre, followed by sturdy seed-heads.
Phormium cookianum subsp hookeri ‘Tricolor’ has spikes of tubular, yellowgreen flowers in summer above clumps of sword-shaped, creamy-yellow and green striped leaves, with a thin red edge.