the times Saturday May 28 202218 Outside
named x Semponium. The huge black
rosettes of x Semponium ‘Destiny’ look
set to stand minus 2C in a dry spot,
unlike the now common ‘Zwartkop’.
No wonder it’s plant of the year.
The nursery developing
semponiums is Surreal Succulents
and well worth a look.Chelsea ideas to try in
your own garden
Use orange geums to brighten
your borders
There’s something ludicrously
cheerful about orange geums. Give
them a fertile moist soil and keep
them deadheaded and they will
flower well into the summer. Then
cut away the whole flower stalk.
Great for cool, damp gardens.Foxgloves and lupins were everywhere
— here’s how to plant them
Foxgloves are biennials, establishing onecomprising an arrangement of curving
clay walls, levels and spaces. It had a
theme based around mental health but
it still felt like a real place as much as
a message. I could have enjoyed
gardening there.
Occasionally at Chelsea a
particular plant leaps and makes a
real impact. For me this year it was
Hosta ‘Devon Green’ in the SSAFA
Armed Forces charity’s garden. I’ve
never seen a hosta look so amazingly
olive green, almost bronze. Surprisingly
it’s a sport of the blue-grey
‘Halcyon’, which I’ve grown and
recommended for years.
The plant of the year competition
had many offerings. That massively
popular, just about perennial Salvia
‘Amistad’ (dark purple, chest-high)
was there in a new form, ‘Pink
Amistad’. And there were three big
succulent aeoniums, ever more
popular now. To be precise, two were
aeonium hybrids made with the hardier
houseleeks (Sempervivum) and so areT
horn — our native
hawthorn, that wildest of
trees — was everywhere
at Chelsea this year,
from the statuesque
multistemmed specimens
in Ruth Willmott’s Morris
& Co garden to the formal, flat-topped,
shade-giving standards on Richard
Miers’s With Love garden for Perennial,
a wonderful charity that cares for
professional gardeners in serious need.
Thorns do indeed make fine garden
trees — good bee-friendly flowers, great
hips, never too huge, flowering even
when clipped once they have settled
down to their final size and shape.
So many gardens included wildflowers,
even simple green ones like plantains
and garlic mustard and of course masses
of ferns and simple grasses, but to set
these off — to spike the quietness —
there were the purple spires of native
foxgloves and exotic opium poppies,
sweet rocket and lupins.
Just as that wild and grassy native look
needs the odd spike of colour to lift its
spirits while it does its undoubted
ecological good, it can also be helpful to
introduce among it some shapes of a
more definite outline so that the wild
garden still “reads” to the eye. For this,
designers were using variegated
pittosporums, small-leaved evergreens
that can, if you like, be clipped like
box. The favourite, as ever, was the
black-purple-leaved ‘Tom Thumb’ at
only 90cm, but others can be maintained
happily enough at 2m tall.
The wild trend wasn’t quite
everywhere. There was a more
traditional if contemporary approach
from Andy Sturgeon in the Mind garden,
year, then flowering the next and dying.
Grow them from autumn-sown seed or,
if you want fancy colours/varieties,
from live plants. Lupins are short-lived
perennials and easy to grow from seed,
which provides fabulous colours,
although once again named varieties are
best bought as plants. Some people like
to scrap plants after one year’s big
flowering and start again. Watch out for
fat lupin aphids.Upgrade your window box — don’t only
plant geraniums
It’s good to be ambitious with balcony
planting — take inspiration from the
Cirrus balcony garden at Chelsea. Think
high, middle and low. Try a trellis arch
with clematis or morning glories if it
will stand the weight, tubs of herbs and
wildflowers at low level, a mini-pond,
and if it’s one of those scorching hot
balconies, succulents that will cope with
heat and not mind drying out when
you’re away for a couple of days.Grow edibles — not just practical, they
look amazing
If you can guarantee reliable watering,
there’s nothing like growing edibles,
especially fruiting varieties, to make a
space seem attractive — get inspired by
Tayshan Hayden-Smith’s garden. In a
warm, sunny spot there’s no beating
tomatoes and chillies, the tomatoes even
as trailing varieties in baskets if need be.
There’s still plenty of time to get them
in. And climbing French beans on a
wigwam are simplicity itself.Galvanized zinc tubs are back
Like the zinc look? The grey of
galvanised tubs is a restful colour and
they are usually big enough to grow
large permanent plants as well as
bedding — Ann Treneman showed us
how with her Chelsea container garden.
The handles are pretty useful too. They
are available online, new or antique,
immaculate or raddled, but in both cases
you will need to provide holes in the
bottom. And if the zinc coating is worn
at the base, the rusting steel below will
quickly stain decks and paving.Chelsea 2022: the trends to try at home
Foxgloves, geums
and spiky grasses.
Stephen Anderton
picks his favourites
The Cirrus Garden
by Jason WilliamsTIM SANDALL/RHS; ALAMY; SIDONIE WILSONOrange geumZinc tubs in Ann
Treneman’s garden