The Giant Oat Grass inhabits high, dry ground in southern Europe and, although I have never seen it in the wild, I can imagine them rising above their companions in the steppe. This is how they like to be, in the company of plants that do not overshadow the tussock of evergreen foliage and where in the longest days of the year they take the light and hold it in a hovering suspension of coppery awns.
The stipa is an old favourite. I grew it first and en masse as an early emergent in the Barn Garden at Home Farm. We used the pockets amongst the old cobbles where previous buildings had been razed to the ground and allowed the oat grass to lead the mood in June. I let the Californian poppy seed through a sprawl of Potentilla ‘Gibson’s Scarlet’ at its feet and the rusty spears of Digitalis ferruginea ascended up into the cloud to score the vertical. I have the Stipa here too, also by our barns and growing in nothing but rubble and subsoil where they stand head and shoulders above their companions. To play on the dilapidated mood of the rusty buildings they are teamed with evening primrose and the tiny pinpricks of a wild dianthus.
Spearing at speed from the basal foliage as the days lengthen, the stipa are a litmus in this race to the longest day. Angling up and out so that there is sufficient room for the flowers to take their own space when they break the tall tapers, they head into a miraculous fortnight of flower. The panicles open out at head height to form a cage through which the wind can easily pass. The golden moment is the week the anthers furnish themselves with pollen, dangling free and on tiny hinges for mobility and ease of distribution for wind-blown pollen.
Though it strikes a particular mood of dry airiness in the garden, Stipa gigantea goes with almost anything if you pick it and bring it inside for closer observation. We have it here with a couple of neighbours from the planting. A tall Dianthus giganteus from the Balkans, which favours the same conditions and seeds about in the open places. It has proven to be long-lived here where the ground drains freely and has seeded easily but not annoyingly amongst but not into the crowns of neighbouring plants. Rising to almost a metre here, it is an easy companion, content to find its place on the edge of the planting and rising through the stipa to provide an undercurrent of colour. With blood red calyces and magenta buds that deepen the mood, the flowers open a soft rose-pink.
Close by, but very much in their own space, are the Baptisia x variicolor ‘Twilite Prairieblues’. Where many perennials are happy to be moved if you don’t find them the right position, you need to place the False Indigo in the right place the first time, because they like to put their feet down and hate disturbance thereafter. Being leguminous they fix their own nitrogen and are happy in the rubbly soil. As prairie-dwellers they hate to be overshadowed and will dwindle if a neighbour throws shade, but given a place they like with the surround of good light, they are long-lived and easy.
I have been experimenting with several of the hybrids for their longevity and their curious in-between colours and this one is a beauty. The female parent is the more usual indigo blue B. australis, but the male parent here is the yellow flowered B. sphaerocarpa and this provides the yellow keel. The colour of the standards is neither one thing nor another. A smoky violet-purple, without being muddied.
Rising fast and tall and again racing to the solstice, the lupin-like flowers strike a vertical accent whilst in flower. As they go to seed the plant becomes a rounded form that you need to allow room for as it fills out as it matures. The presence in summer is strong and definite, with good healthy glaucous foliage and, later, long-lasting seedpods that darken in winter to charcoal-black.
Though from the altogether different growing conditions of the cool damp meadows of southern China, the Iris chrysographes ‘Black Form’ refers here to the winter colours of those baptisia seedpods. Though iris could become a serious obsession, the reappearance of this one every June is always spellbinding. Black on first appearance, but the deepest royal purple on closer observation, they are worthy of a backdrop against which they will not be lost. In the garden they are allowed to hover in the paler suspension of Bowles’ Golden Grass, where their beautiful form is made all that much clearer. And here too, the stipa shows us that it is worth experimenting with associations you might not choose for their cultural compatability, but for what they might inspire beyond their place in the garden.
Words: Dan Pearson | Flowers and photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 19 June 2021
Marked in the trees on our westerly horizon, the sun came to its furthest reach exactly a fortnight ago. Long-awaited rains wet the ground deeply in the run up to midsummer’s eve and with it came the surge of exponential growth. A tangible feeling of opportunity and leaning into the light. Eglantines foamed pink where I’ve woven them into the hedgerows and the garden reared up, the layers suddenly asserting themselves and deepening.
The garden that wraps us close becomes increasingly important as the meadows dim and go to seed. Next week will see the start of the first being cut for hay and, as the fields simplify, we draw back from our meanders to count our first orchids and to check upon the spread of this year’s yellow rattle. It is then, as we pass into summer, that the garden becomes more complex, and deliberately so. First, waves of colour to hold your attention and then the layering of detail, which is planned to run from now through into late autumn.
This is the first year that the garden is revealing what I have been planning for. Settled by four years of growth up by the barns, we can see the volumes emerging now. Baptisia the size of armchairs asserting themselves handsomely amongst the self-seeders around them. Bupleurum falcatum that has run riot in the gravel and Eryngium giganteum now showing that it has a hold and will be here to stay. The Crambe cordifolia have their roots down too and have shown it in clouds of flower that you have to crane your neck and look up into. This feeling of the planting being settled is good.
It will be another couple of years before the woody material in the garden starts to have a presence, but you can see the arch in the Rosa glauca now and start to imagine how these forms will provide an anchor point for the perennials around them and a more significant foil with their glaucous-pink foliage. This is the third summer in the outer ripple of the main garden and the second for the inner beds that were planted the October before last, but already the planting is mingled and presenting some long-awaited couplings.
With the ground now covered and the gaps of last summer already forgotten, I can start to see how the plants are interacting. The community works well where there is a balance and the plants sit happy in each other’s company. Close to the path I have woven a ribbon of Bupleurum longifolium ‘Bronze Beauty’ to provide the way through with a layer of consistency. This delicate umbellifer pairs well with so many things for having a complexity of colours in its flowers – brown, sepia rust, saffron, lime green – and air in the plant too, so it that hovers. Out here on our hot, open slopes, the plants are failing where they are most exposed to a baking and tell me where they prefer to be by seeding into the cooler pockets. This is the best of educations and the best way for the garden to feel lived-in and truly naturalistic.
Trifolium repens ‘Quadrifolium Atropurpureum’ also lines the paths at the beginning of the garden where the colour is deliberately strongest and brightest. I have grown this dusky, four-leaved clover since I was a teenager and have never tired of its darkness and the welcome foil it provides. Here on our hearty soil it grows lush, the colour browner and less dark at a glance. Grow it harder and the leaves are smaller and deepest mahogany, the growth less full. Here I am surprised it has not eclipsed the basal rosettes of the Dianthus cruentus that I’ve marched through it, but they seem happy so far. A native of Greece, the brilliant pinpricks of crimson are held tightly together on wiry drumsticks and, although you almost loose the structure of the plant against the clover, the suspension of colour is dramatic and a feisty pairing with the Salvia ‘Jezebel’ with which is is also combined (image below).
It will be interesting to see if the dianthus is able to seed amongst the lush growth of the clover. Thinking about its rubbly home in Greece I doubt it, so have planned ahead with a newly raised batch of easy-to-germinate seedlings. They take their first year gathering strength in a rosette of foliage and come to flower in their second year. Given a brightly lit aspect I expect them to be reasonably long lived. My original plants – now being lost to eryngium seedlings down by the barn – are in their fifth summer and showing no signs of tiring where they still have the room to breathe. A commodity that is rapidly becoming less available to all but the strongest and wiliest.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 6 July 2019
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