With the evening sun setting hundreds of them alight, the foxgloves made a mysterious and beautiful picture, writes Jane Powers.
AT THE TIME of writing, the rain has been falling for hours, but perhaps by the time you are reading this the weather will have stopped sulking and weeping. I cannot remember a recent day when the heavens have not leaked with grim and grey regularity. Last month's rainfall was double the norm in parts of Ireland (including mine), and the meteorological people have gleefully predicted weeks more of the same woebegone stuff. Not to mince my words, I'm feeling droopy and downcast.
At times like this, a person (well, this person, anyway) needs to actively search for glints of light, in order to keep from sinking into sodden melancholia. Thank goodness, the garden provides just the thing in the shape (literally) of certain plants. Spikes and spires of blossom are uniquely uplifting among flower-shapes. They draw our gaze away from our boots, progressively upwards, and magically elevate our mood from where it had been dejectedly hunched, down in the dumps.
Tall towers of flower are the most obvious of all inflorescences: it is impossible for our eyes to ignore them. They can be used to call attention to a particular spot in a view. For instance, if you plant a threesome (or moresome) of the Canary Islands echium (E. pininana) in a distant part of the garden, they will act as an eye-catcher from April (when they start to flower) until the end of summer; in fact, any bold vertical plant can serve this purpose. And in a herbaceous border, spikes of delphinium, monkshood and lupin are exactly the thing to put some structure on what might otherwise be a blobby and indeterminate pile of colour.
Among the best spires (and positively the easiest to grow) are the common, biennial foxgloves. The white form of this native plant (Digitalis purpurea f. albiflora) is the most optimism-inducing, as it shoots its light-laden flower stems towards the sky. It is effective at brightening a dull corner, and should be planted en masse, as many as can be crammed in (leave at least 50cm between each plant, or more if it is a large area). You need plant them only once, as they selfseed all over the place each year. If they are in the wrong position, the plants can be carefully lifted while young, and moved to a more suitable location. If you have both white and purple foxgloves in your patch, it's easy to differentiate between the seedlings of the two colours. The purple ones have dark veins (more visible on the backs of the leaves), while the white-flowered kinds are uniformly green.
Foxgloves are versatile and uncomplaining, and impervious to pests and diseases. They grow in most soils and in either sun or light shade. One of the prettiest plantings I ever saw was in a dappled woodland at Inishbeg estate in west Cork, designed, I believe, by Verney Naylor, a previous guardian of this column. With the last minutes of the evening sun setting hundreds of them alight, they made a mysterious and beautiful picture: one of those rare sights that return to the mind for years.
I'm grateful to my own foxgloves for thriving in our bone-dry urban soil, and I feel similarly indebted to the mullein or verbascum clan, which is equally drought-proof. The two woolly verbascums, V. olympicum and V. bombyciferum, are real show-stoppers, pale and furry in all their parts, except for their yellow flowers, borne on branching spikes that rise to the heavens. The first species, from Greece, is a little larger than the second, a Turkish native, and can reach 2m in height; it also branches in a more candelabra-ish fashion. Both die after flowering, although occasionally V. olympicum may hang on for another year. But generally they seed about, especially in gravel, so they leave their progeny behind them. Dozens of new verbascum hybrids have appeared in the last decade and a half, in a delightful range of hard-to-describe, expensive-silk-underwear shades, in the peach, copper and wine portion of the spectrum. Some are not so long-lived, so don't expect them to turn up again next year, and you won't be disappointed.
Verbascums are promiscuous plants, crossbreeding with gusto, and throwing up mongrel children that defy identification. I've no idea what the plants are in my own garden, but I value them hugely, for their long flowering season, excellent shape, and unfailing ability to cheer me up.
VERBASCUMS AND FOXGLOVES both belong to the figwort family, Scrophulariaceae. The rather septic-sounding sobriquet isn't a coincidence, as the figwort itself, (Scrophularia), was so named because it was thought to cure scrofula, tuberculosis of the lymph glands. Several of the other members produce their flowers on spikes, and are useful for adding spirit-raising steeples to a planting. Among them are purple toadflax (Linaria purpurea) and its pink form 'Canon J. Went'; the Cape figwort (Phygelius); pentemons in plenty; veronica and Veronicastrum. All are fairly trouble-free plants.
Hollyhocks are the classic cottage-garden tall plant. Most are perennial, but are often better grown as biennials, as they invariably fall foul of fungal rust in subsequent years. So, don't be afraid to rip them out after their first year's flowering. Another fine exclamation mark of flower is the Eremurus. Its thousands of tiny blooms (of pink, white or yellow) are carried on racemes that, in some varieties, are up to a metre long. The starry flowers have whiskery, conspicuous stamens, lending the inflorescences a bristly appearance, which gives this plant one of its common names: foxtail lily. Its other popular name, desert candle, reveals its origins: dry grassland and semi-desert habitats, in eastern and central Asia. Winter wet is hostile to its strange, starfish-like, fleshy roots, and they may rot and disintegrate if the soil is soggy. Enemy number one, however (in some gardens), is the slug and snail tribe, which attack it the minute it pokes its nose above ground in spring.
There are many other plants whose flowering stems serve as upward-shooting shafts of light in the garden: Actea, asphodel, asphodelene, francoa, loosestrife, some campanulas and salvias, and the spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza), to name a few. Lilies are also sterling bringers of brightness, more in the form of multiple lampshades on stems, rather than illuminated spires. The king of standard lamps is the aptly named giant lily, Cardiocrinum giganteum. It takes up to seven years to flower, and it dies after setting seed, but its once-off swan song is worth waiting for. It bears white, red-marked trumpets (a dozen or more), the size of your hand and scented, and they are arranged on stems up to four metres tall. It is a woodland plant, and there is nothing better to light up the dimness between the trees, especially in the dark days of an Irish summer.