The last place I lived in England was Oxford, that “City of Dreaming Spires” as the poet Mathew Arnold dubbed it; walking around the garden centre this last week, I was strangely reminded of those dreaming spires but these ones were all floral spires. It struck me how many of our late spring/early summer flowerers are spire-like. It’s almost like they’re all stretching and reaching their long arms upwards to the sky, drawn ever higher by the sun’s warmer rays.
I love these towering plants – they invariably make a big impact in our gardens and, whilst we wouldn’t want to be without their more humble friends, a real showstopper lifts the garden to another level. Height changes are important but these thrusting spires add drama too. Often the fat poker-like heads are composed of many small flowers, tightly packed, forming intricate whorls around the stem.
Echium fastuosum syn. candicans is a perfect example of this. The Pride of Madeira, as it is affectionately known, sends up fat flower spikes in May and June, each rising around 0.75m above the mass of rough grey-green foliage. Colour is variable ranging through the blue spectrum to lilacs and verging on lilac/pink. Each of these spikes may contain around 200 individual flowers and every plant will send up several of them. The effect is stunning. Unfortunately, the plant has a tendency to be short-lived but I’ve never spoken to anyone who wouldn’t replace it again.
Acanthus mollis, the delightful bears’ breeches, is another wonderful plant. I’d be happy with this one purely for its dramatic and lushly jagged foliage – particularly good this year after all the rain – but the flowers add to its stateliness. Deeply blue/black, they tower up to 1m. Stand close-by on a warm early-summer day and you’ll clearly hear the seed pods exploding and catapulting their contents far and wide. That’s why you’ll see the seedlings appearing in all sorts of odd corners. In damper climes they can reach nuisance status but that’s unlikely to happen here.
Verbascums are similar in that they have large, dramatic, crumpled leaves and flower spikes but most of this family will be happy in much drier conditions than the acanthus. We have in stock the delightful verbascum phoeniceum, or purple mullein, though it’s pretty flowers come in shades of violet, lavender, rose and white. Said to be a little short-lived in damper climates, I find that the hot, dry conditions here seem to provoke a longer life and, in any case, it self-seeds readily providing lots of plants in a pastel rainbow of hues. It’s extremely pretty in clumps around the garden and also makes a good showing in a tub.
Foxgloves and hollyhocks are two more great towerers that you’ll all know. Neither are thought of as very typical of Mediterranean gardens but both grow easily here and are never less than spectacular. They look great planted in olive groves, in gravel areas or adding vertical stripes of colour to white walls.
Slightly softer, but still with spire growth to my mind, are red valerian, centranthus ruber, and the gaura lindheimeri, sometimes described as the whirling butterfly plant – with reason! The valerian (not to be confused with the medicinal herb, valeriana officinalis) is a plant that is out of fashion, but I love it anyway. Its dusky-pink colouring is unusual – try cotinus coggygria ‘Royal Purple’ as a perfect foil with its rounded form and deep colouring. Valerian is very happy in dry and stony conditions, typically self-seeding into old lime-stone walls. The gaura is such a pretty plant, yet is so rarely used. A little thirsty at first, it soon settles down and becomes very drought tolerant. Masses of thin wiry stems, up to 1m tall, are produced with delicate-looking orchid-like flowers in white, shell-pink or a deeper rosy-pink that seem to float on the air like tiny whirling butterflies. It’s ideal where light bulking is required or great against a backdrop of deep green, say of tall cypress. If you’ve a long driveway, try lining it with gaura interspersed with big clumps of iris. Even out of flower, the iris will add a good chunkiness to the scheme whilst the gaura will continue sending up their tiny butterflies on tall stems right through spring, summer and autumn.
All of these perennials can be planted now. Find them a space in your gardens and they’ll quickly make themselves at home, spreading and popping up in all sorts of unusual spots where you’d never have imagined they could look so good. They are all avid self-seeders – maybe they’re aspiring to even greater things!
