The garden is always in flux, shifting from season to season and year to year. This time last year there were cracks in the soil wide enough to put your hands down and I was already having to water. This year the spade plunges deep into soil that is still damp to the core and throwing a voluminous beginning to summer.
We respond to this flux. The achillea hated the winter, then the army of slugs grazed weak growth to leave unplanned for gaps and a missing component. The Cleome that were slated to plug the last minute holes failed to germinate and the Nicotiana mutabilis that were my only back up to take their place will have to be watched with the slugs, which have reproduced like never before in the wet. The flux – for it is inevitable, wet winter, cold or dry – is covered for mostly with the self-seeders. I depend upon their opportunistic behaviour, but you need to keep an eye on them if they are not to suddenly overwhelm. Innocent looking Shirley poppies that in just a fortnight will outcompete the perennial company around them and the creamy Eschscholzia that look harmless enough with the bearded Iris, but then prevent the sun from falling to ripen their rhizomes. You do not know until next year that they have missed the sun they need and learn to remember to pull the Californian poppies, leaving the merest handful for their smattering of flower and seed for next year.
I have deliberately kept the self-seeders to a minimum in the main garden to minimise the time it takes to edit them back to the right number. I leave tens rather than thousands when editing them down to the bare essentials in April for, if you get your timing wrong, thousands take a morning and not an hour to pull. However, at the far end of the garden, I have let the pioneers have their reign in the raft of farmer’s rubble surrounding the barns. First to emerge ahead of ‘Miss Willmott’s Ghost’ are the Verbascum phoeniceum ‘Violetta’. The plants are mostly biennial, with a matt green rosette no larger than a tea plate lying flat to the ground. Their ascent is quiet but fast and in just a week they push up into flower. We let them seed without editing, for they are harmless and easy company. En masse, a group registers gently, their stems so fine as to be almost invisible, their evenly distributed flowers, a soft, rich purple.
The outliers to a main group are the first of a new colony. They place themselves far better than we ever could and create chance combinations that you can claim the next time you use them to the betterment of the garden. Here they hover amongst the grey-leaved Thalictrum flavum glaucum and smoky Baptisia, their last flowers teetering at the top of the stem as the first of the Baptisia flowers open at the bottom of theirs.
We watch the Verbascum closely, for the first flowers opening coincides with the hatching of the mullein moth caterpillars, which make their way up the stems where they feast on the flower buds. If they have a population explosion we pick off the stripy caterpillars, but generally rely on the birds to keep them under control. From year to year the Verbascum can be gone as fast as they arrive if the caterpillars get the upper hand, but there are always enough to seed.
The new sand garden is a continuation of the pioneer planting around the barns, but I have made the decision not to include plants I know to self-seed with profligacy to keep the maintenance down. The Oenothera stricta ‘Sulphurea’ and Eryngium giganteum are kept behind a defensive strip of open gravel that separates the two plantings. However, when planning the sand garden the year before last, I grew a couple of dozen Verbascum bombyciferum ‘Arctic Summer’ (main image) to plug the gaps while I waited for slower-growing perennials to come to fruition. They came easily from seed and last May I planted them into the sand in anticipation of their silvery rosettes whilst they settled in. But they quickly plunged their taproots into the sand and deep into our native soil and to paradise. A hot, dry neck and limitless supplies of goodness saw the plants balloon, their felted foliage expanding daily to flatten anything I had planted within arm’s reach. To my surprise half the plants bolted, rising up to a magnificent two metres and proclaiming their potential dominance.
I pulled those that overwhelmed their neighbours and left a handful to enjoy and to test their eagerness to seed. Biennials plan for their short life and are usually good seeders and they have done just that into the sand. I am now weeding them all out and relocating a small number into the shingle of the track to the barn where the living will be less luxurious. I hope that they will grow leaner here and, over time and successive generations, adapt to this new position. Also that the birds in the nearby hedgerow will learn about the caterpillars, which have run amok on the steroidal plants in the sand garden. Hopefully a better balance can be struck between plants that grow more in character with those you might see on a Mediterranean hillside and the moths that come to predate.
To compensate for their removal in the sand garden, I sowed Verbascum roripifolium last summer to reinstate the vertical after having seen Derry Watkin’s plants in her gravel garden at Special Plants. Though later flowering than their cousins, this Greek species is a finely drawn line in contrast. A rosette of delicately frilled foliage sends up airy spires, the clear yellow flowers appear to hover in mid-air, around shoulder height and dancing in the breeze like a Calder mobile. They are still mostly in bud and so far free of the caterpillars which, for the meantime, appear to favour their more luscious cousin.
Words: Dan Pearson | Photographs: Huw Morgan
Published 1 June 2024
