the botanists have been at it again

One plant that does very well in the light sand of the long bed is Gaura lindheimeri.  It is a charming thing, a perennial which sends up tall, wiry flowering stems, which in turn carry slender side stems. The white flowers are carried up the lengths of each stem, opening successively from the bottom upwards with only a couple out on each stem at any one time.  This gives the whole plant an airy, ethereal quality, and you can see why one of the popular cultivars is called 'Whirling Butterflies', especially since the individual flowers are vaguely butterfly shaped, having four spoon shaped petals, two held out horizontally and the other two held erect above them, like a butterfly's wings. The stamens and stigma are also white, and protrude beyond the petals, adding to the grace of the flowers if not the butterfly illusion.  The developing seed pods that remain as the flowers fade are pinkish, as are the unopened buds, giving the plant a faint rosy glow.

I do not grow any of the named varieties, but the plain species, which itself has the RHS Award of Garden Merit.  They were raised from seed, and looking at my spreadsheet of garden plants I see that the group in the long bed was started in 2006, and added to most recently in 2010.  They have in turn seeded themselves modestly around.  This is good going for Gaura, which has a reputation for not being reliably winter hardy.  Cold may be a factor, and I suspect that damp is also.  Drainage in the long bed is about as sharp as you can get.  I leave the old stems intact until spring before cutting them down, in the hope that they will provide some protection to the base of the plant, but have never tried systematically cutting some down and not others in the autumn to see whether it actually makes any difference.

There are some attractive varieties on the market with red and pink flowers, though they tend to be lower growing and without the airy delicacy of the species.  They do have a reputation for not being reliably perennial, and on that basis I haven't tried growing any of them myself, though maybe next year I should relent, and see if the ultra-sharp drainage works for them too.  Beth Chatto always has a few near the entrance and cafe in the gravel garden, but I'm not a regular or observant enough visitor to have worked out if they are the same plants from year to year.

The leaves on my plants tend to develop black spots, which look vaguely unhealthy, though you have to inspect them quite closely to see them.  According to Christopher Lloyd this is just something that Gaura does, and is not a sign of ill health, merely the way things are.

Alas, the botanist have been busy with Gaura, and decreed that it should now be called Oenothera lindhiemeri.  I didn't know that until reading it just now on Wikipedia, where I also saw that a common name for it is Lindheimer's Beeblossom.  It's a native of Louisiana and Texas, and I think we can guess that the common name hails from that side of the pond.  Certainly when I worked at the plant centre nobody ever came in asking for Lindheimer's Beeblossom.  It's an apt name, though, as the bees love it.