Friday 14 November 2014

second flowering of the shrubby germander

My Teucrium fruticans 'Azureum' is flowering for a second time this year.  Not just a few odd late flowers, but an attempt at a full-blown display.  I'm not sure we'll get the full benefit before the first frost puts paid to its efforts, but the Teucrium seems not to know that.  It's a nice plant, the shrubby germander, with four sided stems and little, dead nettle shaped flowers that place it firmly in the mint family, and furry, silvery leaves.  The species has been grown in UK gardens since the early eighteenth century (a fact gleaned from WJ Bean's Trees and Shrubs Hardy in the British Isles, and not even Wikipedia).  Unfortunately it comes from Portugal, the Western Mediterranean, and the Adriatic, and is not reliably hardy here, despite scraping into Bean's masterwork.  He warns that while it can be grown in the open in the milder parts, elsewhere it needs the protection of a wall. The brighter blue flowered form 'Azureum', introduced by Collingwood 'Cherry' Ingram from the High Atlas of Morocco is more tender still, and Bean says sternly that it needs a very warm corner.

Mine does not have a very warm corner, or any kind of corner at all.  It is my second plant, the first one have snapped clean off at the base in a gale of wind soon after planting, which says something about quite how unsheltered a spot I have it growing in.  The rootstock did not regrow.  And I'm not sure that north east Essex counts as a milder part.  We are fairly close to the sea, but still three or four miles inland.  In our favour, we do have Bean's other key requirement of light, well-drained soil.  Boy, is the front garden well drained.  An ordinary T. fruticans planted years ago in the meadow has survived the recent hard winters, though it was cut back, without any walls or corners.

I'm not really so surprised that the Teucrium is having a second flowering.  It seems in the nature of a lot of Mediterranean shrubs to grow in the autumn.  Looking around the garden I see that the Cistus have all made generous growth in the past couple of months, and are looking very fully clothed and comely.  Phlomis italica, that appeared as forlorn as a newly sheared sheep after I'd finished cutting off its spent flower stalks in the summer, has covered itself resplendently in new, grey, felty leaves, and the rosemary bushes are growing apace, apart from one that is doing that rosemary thing of suddenly going black and dying in short order.

An explanation is given in Hugo Latymer's useful book on Mediterranean gardens, published in association with Kew.  He says that the 'second spring' is characteristic of Mediterranean gardens, because the period in the first spring between the last frosts and summer's drought is so short.  Many plants take a rest in the dry summer months, then take advantage of the long period from the arrival of the first rains to the first frost when conditions for growth are excellent to do just that. We didn't have a drought this summer, but we've had a long, mild autumn with some rain, and many of the Mediterranean species in the garden have taken full advantage and grown lustily.  And in the case of the Teucrium started flowering again.

Mindful of the fact that it is a dubiously hardy plant, and not the easiest thing to find for sale just when you want it, I experimentally stuck some cuttings in compost this summer and put them in the heated propagator.  I'm not sure if the success rate was literally a hundred per cent or whether I've thrown out the odd mouldy, unrooted stem, but the vast majority took and I now have a one litre pot stuffed with young plants.  I'll leave them like that until spring rather than risk disturbing their roots now, though after what I've said about their innate desire to grow in autumn maybe it wouldn't have been such a risk to separate them out a month ago.  I was playing it safe after having killed half my penstemon cuttings by potting them singly last autumn.

Left to its own devices T. fruticans forms a spreading plant, dense at the centre but open and fringed with new silvery growths around the edges, but it can be clipped into compact domes.  That is how I want to use my cuttings, apart from having some young plants as an insurance policy against another hard winter.  Combined with clipped mounds of myrtle, also coming along as cuttings, santolina, and box, they will form a division between the beach-themed approach to the blue summer house and the railway garden, filling an odd shaped corner and usefully covering a patch of gravel that I don't want to have to keep weeding.


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