GARDENS/Jane Powers: How to grow a pink and airy, almost-instant €20 meadow
Back in February I set myself a challenge: to grow a perennial border from seed and to have it flowering by summer. Yes, I was going to have my very own instant garden - or as instant as a person could get if she had to do the gardening herself.
Perennials that flower in their first year are more common than you might think. They include varieties of some of our better-known plants: campanula, geum, lupin, delphinium, verbascum, lychnis and the airy-fairy, must-have Verbena bonariensis. Even the foxglove (Digitalis purpurea), almost the first plant that you learn to recognise as biennial (one that flowers in its second year), has been tinkered with by breeders so that it blooms just months after sowing. The Camelot series, introduced at Chelsea Flower Show in 2004, comes in four colour strains: cream, lavender, rose and white - all with scrumptious wine splotches on their throats. Unlike the wild foxglove, which flowers along one face of the spike, these new hybrids produce bells on all sides of the stalk. They are not as graceful as the slim and sinuous native, but their great cudgels of flowers are useful as muscular verticals in a border.
Some perennial climbers, if sown early enough, will flower in the same year. Among them are the Chilean glory vine (Eccremocarpus scaber), the purple bell vine (Rhodochiton atrosanguineus) and the cup-and-saucer vine (Cobaea scandens). None of these, however, will survive in a chilly garden, or during a hard winter in a mild one. Clematis is tougher, and the genus includes a handful that will often flower in the first year: the yellow
C. tangutica, the blue and mauve C. integrifolia and the creamy 'Korean Beauty' (which is just another name for the species C. chiisanensis).
My nearly instant border was planned for a particularly dry and sunny spot, so all plants had to be guaranteed drought-proof. They also had to be unpalatable to the slugs and snails that live in uncontrollable numbers in our old granite walls, a criterion that unfortunately ruled out lupins and delphiniums. Yet I wanted the flowers to be attractive to other kinds of wildlife, the non-plant-munching kinds, so they had to provide nectar for the bees and butterflies in summer and, in at least some cases, dried seedheads for winter birds. All the candidates for the experiment had to be self-supporting (I didn't want to be messing around with stakes or pea sticks), so that meant no top-heavy or abundantly-flowered species that would flop over if left to their own devices. This fitted in with one of my other wishes, which was for a lightweight, meadowy plantscape (or call it "weedy" if you like). My final requirement was that the border should be affordable, so I set myself a budget of €20.
Several seed companies offer good selections of first-year-flowering perennials. One of the best is the German company Jelitto (www.jelitto.com), a favourite supplier of many professional nursery people. Because Jelitto requires a minimum order of €25, however, and because I wanted to use more widely available seeds, I chose Mr Fothergill's (www.mr-fothergills.co.uk). My shopping spree stretched to eight packets of seed. Among them were Agastache cana 'Heather Queen', which bears tufts of pinky-purple tubular flowers and bracts, with the latter holding their colour long after the petals have dropped; Achillea millefolium 'Cassis', which has flat heads of cerise flowers, fading to a dusty pink; and Salvia pratensis 'Rose Rhapsody', with its densely-packed spikes of rosy-pink blooms. Coreopsis rosea 'American Dream', my fourth variety, has many-petalled reddish-pink stars with golden centres (the gold would be important to make all the pinky flowers look more vibrant). I picked two verbascums (the deep purple Verbascum phoeniceum 'Violetta' and the pink-flushed white V. blattaria 'White Blush'), as well as the fancy foxglove hybrid Digitalis purpurea 'Camelot Cream' to supply some loftier and more upright accents. Finally, I chose the lanky Verbena bonariensis, so that it could sway its lilac bobbles in the breeze above the rest of the crowd.
I sowed all the seed on February 19th. First to germinate was the achillea, edging its tiny green leaves through the compost on March 5th. Within a week everything else was up - except the coreopsis, which for some unknown reason never sprouted, scuppering the idea of its golden bosses enlivening the mainly pink picture. I skipped the pricking-out stage (where seedlings are moved into a roomier tray of compost, or into modules) and transferred all the plantlets into small pots between late April and early May.
Finally, on June 4th (a couple of weeks later than intended) I planted my small (150cm-by-350cm) border, spacing the 62 plants a little closer than recommended, so that they'd be self-supporting and smother weeds. (One of the things that you're often not told about first-year-flowering perennials is that they sometimes forget to reappear in the second year, so if any gaps were to open, the close planting would render them less noticeable.) And I know that garden writers are always telling you not to plant in hot, dry weather, but that's exactly what I did. My method though, was devilishly clever: I soaked all the plants extremely well before planting, dug individual holes for them that I also watered thoroughly, planted them and pulled the dry soil back over. Most importantly, I did not water for a fortnight. My plan was for the wet soil underneath to encourage the roots to grow downwards, making the plants more resistant to future droughts.
We had almost no rain for weeks, yet my new border was full of happy, taut plants - while all around was wilting. I've watered since, but using only recycled waste from the kitchen and shower, and taking care to water individual plants deeply rather than splashing over a wide area.
Now, six months after sowing, I'm pleased with my pink and airy, almost-instant €20 meadow. So, it seems, are the bees, butterflies and hoverflies that mumble and flit around its buoyant flower heads. jpowers@irish-times.ie