In 2019, I made a memorable visit to Southern France to see Olivier Filippi’s nursery and Jardin Sec, to meet plants I hadn’t met before. I was researching the palette for the re-imagining of the Delos garden at Sissinghurst and wanted to better understand the plants of the Mediterranean. To see what might best illustrate a palette of Grecian natives and what plants might be able to adapt to a changing climate and the hotter summers and erratic rainfall that have been playing out these last few years. 

I arrived after dark and was given the annex that sat on the edge of the garden. I rose early whilst the light was still low and thrown over the humps and bumps of plants growing no more than they needed to. Plants that are adapted to the dry climate of the region and forming a landscape that had a cloudlike feeling of forms and textures. Sprawling across the terraces and up close to the French doors I had thrown open to enter were the distinctive domes of a plant I had not encountered until then, but have since grown to love. Making a low, slumped cushion that had obviously taken several years to form, the Lomelosia cretica (main image) was immediately charismatic. The flowers were completely over by this late in the summer, but their papery spheres caught the low morning rake of the sun to form a light-filled halo that hovered above the internal framework. “Would this work in Kent ?” I asked Olivier over breakfast. “Yes of course, if you have the drainage” was his answer. And so, the infatuation began.