Tag Archives: foxgloves

Seeing through another’s eyes and TMF here

I am fine with the foxgloves in the Iolanthe Garden but there are no common pink ones

We no longer open for the springtime garden festival here but it is still a time of year when out-of-town friends come to see the garden. One such friend is an Auckland garden designer. I never ask for advice because I think seeking free advice is not much different to asking a medical professional for personal advice at a social event. Some lines should not be crossed. On the flip side, both Mark and I have a policy of not offering unsolicited advice in somebody else’s garden, no matter how tempting at the time, so this may all be a bit self-defeating. Our designer friend has a similar approach but he asked one simple question. We were looking at the Court Garden and he said three words, “Why the foxgloves’?

The large flowered yellow Verbascum creticum is fine but the foxgloves were just wrong in that situation

I suddenly looked through his eyes and indeed it was a good question to ask. I went to some trouble when I planted the garden back in 2019 to add palest, pastel coloured foxgloves to add some height and flowers in spring and I have let them gently seed down. Well, at the time they were meant to be pure white ones but they turned out pastel. I had not questioned their presence since but when I looked with different eyes, it occurred to me that they are, in fact, insipid in that situation. I looked at them for the next two days and on the third day, I pulled the lot out. When I sent a text to my friend to say they were gone, he just replied with the single word “Good”.

Flowering or not, once the decision was made, they had to go

Besides, we were running the danger of TMF – Too Many Foxgloves. For years, I have been so focused on pulling out every common pink one and even paler pink versions of it (because foxglove seed will naturally revert to the unattractive pink form) that I hadn’t looked at the overall picture. While I am particularly fond of the pure white form, especially in the Iolanthe garden which is more perennial meadow than anything else and down in the park, we don’t want them everywhere. It is time to review all locations where we have allowed them to grow and time to limit their range.

It is not even an attractive pink and it doesn’t combine well with other colours. I regard it as a weed.

I went to see a garden during the recent festival which I hadn’t seen for many years and now has new owners. It was a very nice garden and well maintained but as I walked around, I thought to myself that if they asked me for advice, it would be to pull out 90% of their dark pink foxgloves (Digitalis purpurea) , if not the lot of them, leaving just the white ones. They have let them seed everywhere and, to my eyes, it was a definite case of TMF. They didn’t ask, so I didn’t comment. But it made me more aware of letting them grow here in our garden.

No matter how good a plant is, it is still a mistake to have too much of it. I refer not just to foxgloves but also forget-me-nots, mondo grass, common verbascums, Verbena bonariensis, pansies, aquilegias and a host of other plants that self seed around the garden. In our garden, I would also add tree ferns, nikau palms (Rhopalostylis sapida) and kawakawa (Macropiper excelsum) to that list.

It wasn’t the gladious that was the problem; it was the foxgloves

Interestingly, as soon as I removed the pastel foxgloves from the Court Garden, having decided they were the wrong plant and too pallid, the anything-but-insipid Gladiolus dalenii syn natalensis no longer looked out of place at all; it changed from looking somewhat garish to vibrant instead. It can stay after all. It has only just dawned on me that the reason the foxgloves looked insipid in that location is the background. In the Court Garden, they were surrounded by plants that were either pale green hues or silver or many shades of brown. They look more charming in situations surrounded by masses of darker or brighter shades of green. I should have noticed this earlier.

A garden is never finished and even with an established garden, fine tuning it is what keeps it interesting. Sometimes, seeing it through somebody else’s eyes can be very helpful and small changes can make a big difference. I might ask for more advice from people whose opinions I value. Maybe it is not the same as asking my dentist about toothache over social cocktails after all.

The Court Garden with Verbascum creticum but no foxgloves any longer

Biennials, are they worth the effort, he asked.

Verbascum creticum, a biennial with presence in our rock garden

Each Sunday morning at 7.45am, I have a chat with Tony Murrell on Radio Live’s Home and Garden Show. We cover a wide range of gardening matters and during the week before we have a discussion by phone or email to agree an upcoming topic. As an aside, the recent release of very encouraging listener figures for this time slot has sharpened our focus somewhat. There is a scary number of folk out there who listen at that hour.

Today we talked about gardening in the very dry conditions that much of the country is currently experienced, which was my suggestion. Tony’s suggestion of ‘biennial plants – are they worth the effort?’ was put off until next Sunday. But since he suggested it, I have been thinking of biennials which I had never considered as a plant group before.

Ranunculus cortusifolius in biennial for us

Yes! Biennials are worth their place in the garden. I am struggling to imagine our garden without the biennials. Mind you, we don’t put any effort at all into most of them. They are plants that we let seed down, pulling out those which are in the wrong place and letting the other volunteers remain to continue their life cycle.

Annuals are plants that complete their lifecycle in under a year from germination to setting seed and dying. Biennials have a two year life cycle. Most of them will establish themselves in the first year but not bloom until the second. Because of that year spent establishing themselves, many of them can be quite large growers – thugs, even, as Mark calls them. To let these types of biennials seed down, you do need quite a bit of space.

Common they may be, thuggish even, but foxgloves have presence

Some of our key plants are biennial. I am thinking of the large flowered, yellow Verbascum creticum, the biggest geranium of them all, G. madarense, Angelica gigas and … foxgloves. Foxgloves really do fit the thug category but we are fond of them, even the common pinky purple one that is regarded as a weed in this country. We have been working to get the white ones naturalised around the place. “Are you going for the Hidcote look,” Mark asked, for that is the first place where I saw extensive and eyecatching use of pure white foxgloves. I also like the pastel shades, especially pastel apricots, so I have been summarily despatching the deeper pink forms anywhere near the pale ones to stop the bees from cross pollinating the colours, lest they all return to the dominant dark pink over time.

Sadly, most of these meconopsis have died out in this border now

Not all biennials are self-sustaining and strong growing. The highly desirable meconopsis, Himalayan blue poppies, which are extremely difficult in our climate, tend to be biennial – even those that are touted as perennials in more favourable climes. And it has never seeded down for us. To keep it going here, we have to gather seed and raise it in trays to plant out once it is growing. Ranunculus cortusifolius is also biennial in our conditions but it seeds down and keeps going as long as it has its own area where it can be left to do this.

Parsley is biennial, fennel usually so, and what would life be like with parsley in the garden? Once you have it, you just have to make sure that you leave at least one plant a year to seed down in order to keep a permanent supply.

Biennials, like annuals, only represent effort if you are having to raise them from seed or buy them to plant out each year. If you allow them to seed down and find their own niches in the garden, they can be very rewarding, requiring minimal effort. Wanting such plants to seed down is yet another argument for not being too quick to get out the glyphosate and control any germinating plants by spraying them out as soon as they appear, on the assumption that they must be weeds.

Speaking of verbascums, can any UK readers enlighten me on what happened to the blue as blue verbascum named ‘Blue Lagoon’ that debuted at Chelsea in 2012? We have never seen any mention of it since, let alone seen it incorporated into any of the gardens we have visited so wonder if it was a fizzer in the end.

Blue meconopsis take a lot of effort to keep going here. But for this sort of display, the effort is worth it