Creating a backdrop for your floral displays

Press, 27 December 1985, Page 13

Creating a backdrop for your floral displays

Too many gardeners fail to look at the view behind the flowers. Colourful flowers are an important part of gardening; but gardening is also about leaf shape and colour, texture; form; and about striking the right balance between light and shade, and between bright and subdued colours. Foliage, stems, bark, and the shadow patterns cast by overhead leaves all play a part in a satisfying garden picture. One grouping with which I am quite pleased scores on nearly all counts. In a corner where three paths intersect is the massive perennial groundsel, Ligularia Othello, well named because it is a solid, brooding chunk of dark tones.

The leaves, huge and roundish, are dark green, veined and backed with purple; they grow as large as dinner plates, on stout

footstalks which arise directly from the rootcrown.

Later in the summer this plant makes its own contrast when it sends up tall stalks of big, orange daisies, but these are not a part of the present picture. Alongside it, and lightening the texture somewhat, are the deeply cut leaves and shuttlecock flowers of the “masterwort,” Astrantia major, an old European plant once cultivated for medicinal purposes but now strictly ornamental. A member of the carrot family — though the relationship is not apparent to the casual gaze — Astrantia major is the largest of about half a dozen species which vary mainly in size. Its flowers are interesting rather than beautiful, and it is sometimes called a “flower arranger’s plant.” Despite this, I like it. The

Gardener’s 1 DIARY

Derrick Rooney

flowers are greenish white. Adjacent, completing a triangle with these two exciting plants and adding colour to their subdued tones, is the pretty Aquilegia formosa, a wild columbine from North America with much-divided, fem-like foliage and small, nodding, short-spurred flowers which are brilliantly coloured red and yellow. In this group the aquilegia’s colour and texture are just right. Alongside, and contributing to the group at a lower level, is Hosta caput-avis, one of the smaller hostas with green, lance-shaped leaves. Later in the summer the hosta’s spikes of lilac-mauve flowers will be interesting in their own right — they are notable for their large, beaked bracts which are said to resemble a bird’s head, hence the name. Somewhere in the middle of all this and providing near-total contrast of texture are the leafless, spiky branches of our native “desert broom,” Carmichaelia petriei, which grows in the dry, harsh valleys between Lake Pukaki and Central Otago. The broom was looking good until the goat got out one day and ate half of it, but nevertheless it is carrying lots of its tiny violet and white flowers, and contributing a distinctive New Zealand flavour to the group. Two other groupings that I find pleasing in early summer do depend on flower colour. Both include roses.

One is an accidental association of the shrub rose, Yesterday, with selfseeded alstroemerias.

Yesterday, raised in the early 1970 s by Jack Harkness, has been grown in New Zealand about 10 years; it has small leaves

and big sprays of small pink flowers ageing to lavender. I planted it originally to associate with its parent, Ballerina, but in the meantime foxgloves, Bowles golden grass, and the alstroemerias have seeded in, and the connection between the roses has been lost.

Alstroemerias are funny like that. They will often grow where they want to, not where you want them to. This particular colony was a result of my puttiong some spent flower heads on the compost heap. The capsules were still green and milky and any normal plant would have just rotted away, but the alstroemerias ripened in the heat of the heap, and everywhere that the compost went that year, alstroemerias were bound to follow. I am not at all worried about this. Though alstroemerias have great capability to spread by selfscattered seed they are easily controlled, but as the roots descend deeply and the stems need to be above ground only half the summer, you can grow a layer of shallow-rooted plants on top of them. Don’t be afraid of alstroemerias. They will never spread beyond their allotted border if you adopt the following (simply management method: in the first year after planting, cut off the spent flowerheads with secateurs.

In subsequent years, the roots are well enough established to withstand more rigorous treatment. I go over all the clumps as soon as possible after the flowers have faded, and pull the stems right out of the ground. A sharp tug breaks them off cleanly at the root crown, which in any old clup may be 30cm below ground. This leaves bare ground, but if you have got something like dicentras planted there the space is soon filled With foliage. The treatment does not hurt the alstroemerias at all. Unless you want seedlings everywhere, don’t put the spent stems in the comport; dump them or

burn them.

To get back to the combination: the rose has plenty of lavender in it and the alstroemerias — siblings of one of R. E. Harrison’s hybrids — are shades of peachy yellow and apricot. It is an unlikely combination and not one that I would have thought of, but it works. Sometimes nature knows best!

The contrast between the light green, lily-like foliage of the alstroemerias and the heavier rose foliage, especially with the gamboge yellow of Bowles grass in the background, is effective, too.

' Many gardeners think of contrast in terms of opposites, but sometimes a striking effect can be achieved by grouping colours that are very close to each other. This is the reasoning of one of my associations which, I believe, works well for the few weeks when all the components are flowering together. Smothering what I call my trellis (it is really just sheep netting strained between posts) is a tangle of rambling roses which spills: over into an adjoining apple, tree.

In front is the climber, Wedding Day, raised about 1950 by Sir Frederick Stern in Sussex from seed of Rosa sinowilsonii.

This rose has apricot buds which open white, and it hangs on to its petals longer than do most single roses. Behind it, also single but just on the blush side of white, opening from pink buds, is Polyantha Grandiflora, 100 years older. To one side, but growing back into the tangle, are Tausendschon, a pillar rose with double pink, white-eyed flowers, and Bishop Darlington, an American hybrid musk which was described in the catalogue as apricot but which is really the colour of Jersey cream. In the middle of all this somewhere is the “blue” rambler, Violette, and on an end post is Violette’s parent, Veilchenblau, rather reddish at this stage (it will get very “blue” later).