I promised yesterday I would tell you something about some of the South African plants in the front garden. Chatting to a professional bulb merchant at the lily study day, he said that my soil ought to be great for them, and there are several when I tot them up. I've never been there, but always admire any displays of South African flowers going at Chelsea. It is a vast flora, spanning a range of different growing conditions, and among them are some species that find ultra sharp drainage in the Clacton coastal strip an acceptable substitute.
Not the proteas. I wasted time and money sourcing various proteas from Cornish nurseries before admitting that the winters here were just too sharp for them, and if I wanted to enjoy their exotic flowers I'd have to do so at Chelsea, or else go to a florist. But some herbaceous and bulbous species do well.
Agapanthus have naturalised. Most people would recognise an Agapanthus by now, even if they didn't know what it was called. Imagine bright green strap shaped leaves, and a tall flower stem topped by a ball of slender, blue, funnel shaped flowers, and you have an Agapanthus. I was once challenged by a colleague at the plant centre when I remarked that they seeded themselves in my garden. She did not believe they could do that, and thought I must be mistaken and they were running at the root, but there's no mistake, they seed. I have to grub unwanted plants out from the gaps between paving slabs. The seeds are large and dark, and don't travel far, so their rate of colonisation into new territory is slow, but give them another couple of decades and they would cover the turning circle. I'm not sure they could cross the drive to reach the rest of the front garden, but they are very happy in the middle. I have never been without them since first putting in my first few plants nearly twenty years ago, so I should say they were reliably winter hardy in north Essex, given good drainage.
My original plants were bought as Headbourne hybrids, a name given to a strain was once the by-word in Agapanthus, but has come to signify little after years of seeding and lack of quality control over the results. The plants in the garden here very considerably, some flowering in a strong shade of fairly dark blue, and others in a soft blue with a lot of grey in it. I have seen the latter dismissed as muddy, but I like both. A mix of colours looks more relaxed and natural to my eye than a uniform sea of the strongest possible blue.
Most people have probably seen Dierama before as well. Their common name is Angel's Fishing Rods. Long, flexible flower stems rise at this time of the year from tufts of grassy leaves that can look pretty tatty. Funnel shaped flowers (again) hang down from the stems, not grouped in a ball like the agapanthus but strung out individually at intervals, and the stem and flowers move in the slightest breeze. Most of mine are pink, from pale to middling, and I don't have full names for most of them, because many are seed raised, either from bought seed or self sown, and they hybridize like mad.
They grow from bulbs, unlike Agapanthus, which some people who have never dug one up assume must be bulbs from their appearance, but are actually herbaceous, growing from great masses of fleshy white roots. And unlike the hardy Agapanthus, Dierama are evergreen, or should be. They are not always the easiest things to transplant, but once they settle you will have lots, if they decide they like you. A different colleague at the plant centre gave me a white flowered seedling from her garden, which is growing in the back garden but no longer flowering as a conifer encroaches on it, and I need to decide whether to risk moving it, and if so when.
You may not know Watsonia. I went on a visit with a local garden club last year to a garden that grows some, and most people didn't seem to recognise it. It is another bulb, with evergreen foliage, more substantial than that of Dierama. Imagine a glossy Iris foetida, and you're about there. The plant is borderline hardy, and the leaves appear to hate cold winds. My first plants were of Watsonia pillansii, which I raised from seed and initially kept in pots in the greenhouse because I knew they weren't supposed to be fully hardy. They hated life in pots and barely grew or flowered, so in summer 2013 I turfed them out into the gravel to see how they did, as they weren't doing me any good where they were. They started to bulk up and look shinier and happier almost immediately, and flowered modestly last year. Since then they have come through one fairly hard and one mild winter, but I did find that the plants that were relatively well sheltered from wind looked much better at the winter's end than the one near the entrance, that gets the main blast of the south-westerlies. When unhappy, leaves brown at the tips, or die to the base, but remain on the plant and have to be individually cut or pulled out.
They are currently flowering abundantly, in yet another variation on the flowering spike. The stems are slender but sturdy, upright though sometimes developing with a sinuous curve, and the flowers, held individually at intervals up the stem and opening sequentially from the bottom, are wide mouthed, outwards facing funnels. My strain of Watsonia pillansii is a luminous shade of apricot, though in the wild I believe they vary. I know that not everybody likes orange flowers. Indeed, some people seem to regard it as a marker of good taste not to like orange flowers, or yellow, but Watsonia pillansii are simply beautiful, especially when the sun shines through them. Buoyed up by my early success, last year I bought a brick red hybrid and a dwarf pink from the excellent Beeches Nursery, and if I come across any more plants or seed for sale I'll try them. Meanwhile there are tiny, strap leaved seedlings around the feet of the more sheltered W. pillansii which I think are its babies. Whether they will come through the winter without greenhouse protection is another matter, but it would be exciting if they did. Otherwise, the plants set masses of seed if I should feel the need to raise more. Frustratingly, neither of the hybrids from Beeches made any seed last year, so maybe they are sterile.
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