For Jane Powers, plant cadavers are fond reminders of the changing seasons
It has not been a great year for skeletons: not enough summer sunshine to harden the bones, and too much autumn rain. I'm talking about dead plants: the desiccated remains of the season's herbaceous growth. Some gardeners like to tidy away the year's old stems the minute the sap drains from them, but not me. I like to see my plant cadavers rising forlornly here and there in the garden - like lean sculptural effigies of their former selves.
I savour these austere reminders that the garden is cyclical - a nub on the rim of nature's ever-revolving great wheel. It must rotate downwards into decay before it spins up again into growth.
Maybe I'm just a hopeless follower of fashion and have been unduly influenced by Dutch designer-of-the-moment Piet Oudolf. "Some might argue that a plant is not worth growing unless it looks good when it is dead!" he writes in Designing with Plants (Conran Octopus, 1999).
Mind you, not all plants make pretty corpses, and Ireland is a challenging climate for dramatic and upstanding plant carcasses. Furthermore, we get few really good hoar frosts, which is a pity. In the low, almost monochromatic light of winter, a coat of icy crystals can turn a border of skeletal plant remnants into a romantic black-and-white etching.
But there are still plants whose fleshless frameworks will last for many months: teasel (Dipsacus fullonum), with its bristly cone-heads and aggressive, spiny stems, has become a cliché. But it is an excellent one, adding a lofty and fierce presence to the winter garden. It is biennial, flowering in its second year and then perishing, so the whole plant dies off.
Other biennials that are handsome in death are foxgloves (Digitalis species), Scotch thistle (Onopordum acanthium) and mulleins (Verbascum species). Among the mulleins, those that are dramatic in life are not necessarily the best-looking when they waste away. True, the stately, woolly V. bombyciferum and V. olympicum make lively skeletons as they whip their two-metre tails around in the wind, but our native mullein, V. thapsus, which is a modest thing in life, is unexpectedly noble after its demise. Aaron's rod (or in Irish, coinneal Mhuire: Mary's candle) makes a dignified and sturdy column of closely-packed, large seedheads when it dies.
Some biennials are prolific self-seeders, so you need to be ruthless about removing the babies that appear at their dead parents' feet. Most over-winter as a small rosette of leaves pressed against the ground. It's easy enough to uproot them in spring, leaving just a few well-placed individuals to carry on the family line.
One of the more famous biennials (or sometimes triennial: flowering in its third year) is Miss Willmott's ghost. The prickly sea holly, Eryngium giganteum, from the Caucuses and Iran, honours the British gardener, Ellen Willmott (1860-1934), who was supposed to have surreptitiously dropped seeds of this silvery-leaved, spiky plant around gardens that she passed through, as a delayed memento of her visit. The bracts around the flowerheads fade from silver to very pale beige. Recently, at Belvedere gardens in Co Westmeath, I saw this same buffy colour on the soft pincushions left behind when the outer petals dropped off the tall, coarse-foliaged yellow daisy, Inula magnifica. Perhaps the daisy's seedheads won't last long, being of flimsy stuff, but they made a pleasing flurry of furry bobbles skimming along the flower border.
Because of the inevitable process of decay, there comes a time when precious plant relic degrades into unholy mess, dropping its seedheads, breaking its stems and generally losing its interesting structure. That is the time to clear up the wreckage. With some plants, that time comes after months of being an imposing autumn and winter sculpture. With others, the dried-out statue phase may be more ephemeral, lasting just a few weeks. It depends on the fibre of the plant, as well as the weather, the soil and the micro-climate.
But whether your items of plant statuary are long- or short-lived, they deserve a temporary place in the garden. They mark the season, make manifest the process of change - and help to feed the birds.
LOVELY CORPSES
Perennials: Acanthus spinosus, Achillea, Agapanthus, Allium, artichoke (Cynara scolymus), Astilbe, bergamot (Monarda), Crocosmia, Echinacea, Eryngium, Eupatorium, Inula magnifica, many iris (including I. foetidissima, I. pseudacorus, I. sibirica), Phlomis russeliana, Rudbeckia, large Sedum species and cultivars, Verbena bonariensis, Watsonia.
Annuals and biennials: foxglove (Digitalis species), love-in-a-mist (Nigella), Miss Willmott's ghost (Eryngium giganteum), mullein (Verbascum), opium poppy (Papaver somniferum), Scotch thistle (Onopordum acanthium), shoo-fly (Nicandra physalodes), sunflower (Helianthus annuus), teasel (Dipsacus fullonum).
Grasses: Calamagrostis brachytricha, Deschampsia cespitosa, Miscanthus, Stipa.