by James Alexander-Sinclair
I love big plants. Not big pants. Plants. [...] herbaceous plants that go from nothing to gigantic in the space of a few weeks.
I love big plants. Not big pants. Plants.
Not so much enormous shrubs or majestic trees (although they have their place of course), but herbaceous plants that go from nothing to gigantic in the space of a few weeks. I love their energy and their exuberance. By 'big' I mean something that dwarfs its neighbours and reaches at least 2m high. I have five such plants in my garden.
The first is Inula magnifica. I can see the cheerful, shaggy yellow flowers from my office and they never cease to amuse me. The stems are at least 3m tall and they bear vast leaves. It needs a fair bit of water so I planted it just by a downpipe on the house so it gets lots of rain.
My second star plant is Persicaria polymorpha. It is planted by the door to the chicken shed and has been a pleasure since the beginning of May. It sends out great plumes of white flowers that fade to dusty pink as time passes.
Third on the list is Datisca cannabina: a plant I bought from Marina Christopher at Phoenix Perennial Plants. A towering mass of arching stems and finely cut leaves. The flowers are pretty dangling green catkins - not at all obvious.
Fourth is Cephalaria dipsacoides which has very tall slender stems capped with pale yellow, button flowers - like a giant scabious.
My fifth plant is not so much tall as unbelievably beefy - more like a rugby hooker than a heavyweight boxer. Just outside the door is a rodgersia (which I wrote wrote about earlier in the year), whose leaves are as big as toddlers and full of fizz.
Admittedly we are lucky enough to live in the countryside and we have room for these big plants, but even in the tiniest garden this sort of thing can be effective. A big plant in a small space makes a great impact.
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