Saturday Magazine - 31.08.2019

64 SATURDAY MAGAZINE

Pictures: Getty Images, Gary Lawson

T

he first half of the 20th

century was a rich time for

women gardeners. It was

then that the great colour

schemer Gertrude Jekyll came to

the fore, working with the

architect Sir Edwin Lutyens.

Vita Sackville-West rose to prominence at

Sissinghurst in the 1950s, but there was

one indomitable female, in particular,

who made sure she would never be

forgotten – Ellen Willmott.

She gardened at Warley Place in

Essex and her ghost still roams our

gardens. I’m not being fanciful

because Willmott had a passion for

eryngiums – relatives of our native

sea holly, Eryngium maritimum. Her

particular fancy was for Eryngium

giganteum and wherever she went, she made

sure she had a handful of seeds in the pocket of her

voluminous skirts of black bombazine.

Surreptitiously she would scatter a handful in

every garden she visited, knowing that a year or so

later – the plant is a biennial, growing one year and

flowering the next – the eryngiums would flower

their socks off and the garden’s owner would

wonder where they had come from.

Alas, Willmott is no longer with us, but you can

have her ghost in your garden if you get hold of your

own handful of eryngium seeds, scatter them on to

any patch of well-drained soil and rake them in.

Although Eryngium giganteum is a

biennial and dies after flowering, you

will have plenty of progeny thanks to

the generosity of its seeding. But

there are other eryngiums that are

great for the late-summer garden

and which are reliably perennial.

And many of them can be

propagated by root cutting.

Of the many varieties on offer, it is

worth seeking out Eryngium alpinum,

with its fluffy thistle heads, the variety

‘Graham Stuart Thomas’, which is electric blue,

and Eryngium x oliverianum, a starry, spiny beauty.

They will enrich your borders when many other

early summer flowers are past their best and they

will remind you of a ghostly lady whose floral legacy

lives on thanks to a handful of seeds.

subject

Eryngium is a late-summer star that’s easy to grow – simply

scatter seeds on well-drained soil and nature will do the rest

PRICKLY

‘Eryngiums will

enrich your

borders when

many other

early summer

flowers are past

their best’

‘GRAHAM STUART

THOMAS’ has electric

blue flowers

ERYNGIUM X

OLIVERIANUM is a

star-shaped beauty