NATIONAL Heather Week is just ending. I mention it as you might not have noticed. Daffodil Days and Daisy Days, etc., we are becoming accustomed to them are widely publicised and aim to raise money for worthy causes as well as create awareness. National Heather Week is, I suppose, loosely in the same category - it is about some positive publicity for heathers, creating "public awareness of heathers as versatile and interesting plants".
On the business side, the week has really been about selling heathers and earning some revenue for nurseries and garden centres. So I ought to be charitable and say some nice things about heather.
Firstly, I must be honest and say that I do not grow heathers. I have never wanted to as they are not my sort of plants and do not evoke the sort of garden I aim for. They are too reminiscent of open mountain or bog land, rural scenes which can be very beautiful and which I can enjoy in their own place but which I have no desire to reproduce or emulate within my own garden.
If I lived elsewhere on a high hillside or on the edge of the bog rather than in flat, fertile Co Meath I might feel more at ease with heat hers and the landscape and style which they invoke. Not everyone wants my sort of garden so I must allow consideration for those who have a different taste and seek a different style.
I must agree with the press release: "Heathers give good colour all year long, they are evergreen, they provide good ground cover and they require little maintenance". Perhaps that is one reason I do not warm to them - there is not enough seasonal variation and in requiring little maintenance they deny me the pleasure of constantly attending to their needs. Some gardeners do enjoy and relish ongoing tasks; that surely is what gardening is about and for many of us, a maintenance-free garden would have no fascination or attraction.
But for those with little time and less inclination for the sometimes incessant demands of many plants and flowers, heathers could be the answer. If you must devote spare time to golf, to fishing, to card playing, to socialising or just shifting your money around, then an expanse of heathers might fill a space and offer a pleasing undemanding sameness, a reassuring presence in the garden.
There is a general perception that heathers require an acid soil and that holds true for most of them, so they will be quite at home where rhododendrons thrive. As ground cover under camellias, azaleas or rhodos they can be very useful and will provide an additional attraction. By carefully selecting plants, flowering virtually all year round can be achieved. Those who garden on a limey or alkaline soil need not feel entirely left out as winter flowering heathers are lime tolerant and could be used to provide winter colour in an appropriate setting where the gardener likes that sort of display. One of the winter flowering forms is Erica erigena, an Irish native known in Connemara and Co Mayo. It also occurs in France near Bordeaux and in Spain and Portugal. Like the arbutus, the Killarney Strawberry Tree, it is one of those plants unknown in Britain but indigenous to parts of the west and to Mediterranean regions.
In good conditions Erica erigena can make a substantial shrub up to 10 feet tall, a pleasant change from the more usual prostrate habit of heathers. In the wild the flowers can be pale purple and rarely white or pale pink.
SOME of the pink coloured variations have been named and are readily available in the trade.
"Irish Salmon" and "Irish Dusk" are two which were collected in Co Mayo about 30 years ago. A nice specimen even a few feet in height could look very nice in the right place.
What I find disturbing about heathers is the tendency in gardens to go for massed planting - great beds of heather and nothing else. That sort of treatment runs the thing to death, creating a vista of unending boredom. What heather growers need is a little restraint and variation. Just as an enforced diet of cabbage or potatoes could seriously damage physical and mental health, too much heather can wear one down.