You might think that gardeners, being the wonderful, nurturing folk we are,
would be less inclined to fall slave to fashion, but no. Each year,
gardeners by the million kneel (naturally enough) and worship the latest
trends. Thank goodness we do: new plants are garden bling, the spice of the
game, and if no one bought them, then no one would breed them and gardens
would be all the poorer for it. So what will the well-dressed garden be
wearing in 2008?
There are plants that spend years doing the provincial circuit of private
plantsmen’s gardens before they burst on the scene and make it big time.
They play the Edinburgh Fringe in Penelope Hobhouse’s garden, they have
their own pre-West End tour – the National Garden Scheme stage – and then,
all of a sudden, there they are, desired by all on the red carpet at Chelsea.
This year, the star will be Mathiasella. The name sounds oddly like a
glam gospel singer, I know, but it’s actually a plant in the carrot family,
and like many a trendy plant, it’s jade green – one of life’s great mixers.
To be precise, it’s called Mathiasella bupleuroides ‘Green
Dream’, a Mexican with drooping clusters of bells on a loose, waist-high
stem, and showing seductively more flower than leaf. Sun and sharp drainage,
please. Try it and see.
There’s been a string of black plants in recent years such as Phormium
cookianum ‘Platt’s Black’. But now, making it big at last, is the black
taro, Colocasia esculenta ‘Black Magic’, a
luscious foliage plant to put in hot, moist corners of the garden in the
company of other exotics; show it a banana and it weeps. Another one to try,
but keep it dry indoors for the winter.
Good things are happening on the bulb front. The indoor amaryllis
(Hippeastrum) is fast becoming a common cut flower, so there’s less need to
grow it as a pot plant – no more lamppost stems, leafless bulbs and no
leaves at all through the autumn. But newcomer Hippeastrum papilio is
a different kettle of fish. The flowers are a complicated streaky green and
claret on more slender stems, and the dark green leaves last all year. It’s
insidiously beautiful and it’s in garden centres at last. And if you like
it, look out for the new H. cybister with flowers somewhere between H.
papilio and Charge-of-the-Light-Brigade reds.
A bulb arriving with a bang and in lots of new varieties is the South
African pineapple lily, Eucomis. The maroon-leaved variety, Eucomis
comosa ‘Sparkling Burgundy’, has been around for a year or two, but try
the others, too. They are dubbed “tender”, but don’t mess about growing them
in pots; just plant their noses 6in below the soil and they’ll be fine. They
are cheap now as well: I got a clump of six monster bulbs of E.
pole-evansii from the RHS Cardiff show this year for a fiver. Half shade
and moist soil.
This year’s ingénue must be Dianella, a leathery,
strap-leaved Tasmanian, rather like a narrow-leaved iris, but grown for its
blue flowers and amazing blue berries. Gardeners are for some reason
obsessed with blue berries – think of Clerodendrum and Callicarpa bushes –
and here they are on a perennial. Give her humus-rich woodland soil and
shelter. Also due to arrive in style this year is new dogwood Cornus
kousa ‘Venus’. If you think you have seen one with big
flowers, wait until you see this – they are almost 6in across and really
plentiful. An amazing big shrub or small tree for acidic soil.
But if you want to be fashionable rather than gaze at designer plants, then
forget about new ornamentals and grow vegetables. The sale of vegetable
seeds for growing your own continues to rise at an astonishing rate, while
general plant sales actually fall, proving that everybody is out there
having a go.
Fashionable colours for 2008? The past few years have taken us from the
peach of Verbascum to the mauves of alliums and verbena and to the reds and
purples of cannas and dahlias. We have had the blue, orange and yellow of
the cornfield. So what’s next? I see pastels finally returning
from the wilderness to which they were banished. Cool will begin to be cool
once more.
New building materials? Walk down any suburban street on a still night and, if
you are very quiet, you will hear the sound of decking quietly rotting
(sales are collapsing); Indian sandstone’s now the thing. It’s
relatively cheap and we want to afford stone now. Marshalls, which sponsors
the Chelsea Flower Show, imports Indian sandstone as well as making concrete
slabs here, and last year the company made a great to-do about how, unlike
other importers, it doesn’t use poorly paid child labour to produce it. Does
that make it the more palatable product of the two for eco-gardeners, then?
Well, the company says that, despite the manufacturing process, concrete
still has the smaller carbon footprint. So which will you choose, O
Sustainable Gardener, concrete or sandstone?
New gardens arrive on the scene just as do new plants. Everybody I know seems
to have been to the Old Zoo garden near Blackburn this year and its
reputation is ready to soar. Cherkley Court in Surrey is a garden to watch.
Home of newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, it opened this year for the
first time. There is a fine shell grotto. Good things are going on at
Sheffield Botanical Gardens, too; with £5 million of lottery funding, it is
turning from a sad relic into a great delight, and the range of glasshouses
is fabulous. Make a note in your diary and get out to see them.
Sheffield Botanical Gardens (0114-268 6001; www.sbg.org.uk).
The Old Zoo, Brockhall, Lancashire (01254 244811; www.theavenuehotel.co.uk
or www.ngs.org.uk). Cherkley Court,
Leatherhead, Surrey (01372 380980; www.cherkleycourt.com).
You can get Mathiasella bupleuroides ‘Green Dream’ from Cotswold
Garden Flowers, Worcestershire (01386 422829; www.cgf.net), and it should be more widely available in the spring
