Travel broadens the mind. At least, it broadens your gardening experience. On a recent visit to Frankfurt, I was interested to see on several city balconies garden plants I would not have thought would be hardy there – acacias, Albizia julibrissin and olives as well as bananas and the Chusan palm (Trachycarpus fortunei) writes Andrew Mikolajski.
Growing – spectacularly – to cascade down a wall from an upper storey (rather than clamber up it), the climbing hydrangea, Hydrangea petiolaris, rather took my breath away. Being deciduous, this, of course, is perfectly hardy – but you hardly expect to come across it in the middle of a city.
At the Palmengarten – a kind of mini Kew – one of the curators took me round the glasshouses. They are particularly proud of the new subantarctic house, where they are growing plants from the southernmost part of the Americas and New Zealand. The air has to be specially cooled to keep the temperatures down in summer, though otherwise I think the plants are none too tolerant of frosts.
This is for dyed-in-the-wool botanists, as there are seldom many flowers in here – and few of the plants would be recognisable to most gardeners, apart from some impressive phormiums (or New Zealand flax). This, in fact, reinforced my opinion that this is where these plants really belong – in New Zealand.
Travelling no further than Stoneleigh – former home of the now defunct Royal Show – for the Horticultural Trades Association National Plant Show, I was introduced by Roy Lancaster to a plant that by all rights should not really exist: a delightful buddleja named ‘Pink Pagoda’. Ought not exist because it is a hybrid between two geographically alien plants, the Chinese Buddleja davidii (or butterfly bush, well-known on railway sidings and many areas of waste ground as well as in gardens and recognisable by its slender racemes of honey-scented flowers) and another hybrid, B. x weyeriana (an x in the middle of a plant name always signals ‘hybrid origin’).
Buddleja x weyeriana (I will get there in the end) is a cross between Buddleja davidii and B. globosa, a species found in the South American Andes. The two could never meet in nature, so their compatibility hints at some common ancestry from way back.
You sometimes see globosa in gardens, with its curious flowers which look exactly like bright orange golf balls. The first generation hybrid, B. x weyeriana (I have one in my garden, though I don’t really like it), is a strange thing, which seemingly cannot make up its mind which bus it should be on. The flowers, a washed out orange tinged with purple, form pointy racemes of irregular outline, swelling out bulbously here and there towards the base. Weird.
‘Pink Pagoda’ is a vast improvement, having much larger, more evenly formed flowers of a clear, glowing pink, together with the desirable davidii fragrance. Put it on the shopping list.
Buddleja 'Pink Pagoda' is bred by Peter Moore.
Read more from Andrew Mikolajski on his blog
Love it when flowers mix even when they technically should or could not.
Posted by: michele | Jul 10, 2011 at 11:34 PM