March at Lambley

The flower border is looking is looking particularly telling too. I especially love the Penstemon ‘Evelyn’ bouncing off Echinops ‘Blue Haze’ with the milky white flowers of Artemisia lactiflora behind. Penstemon ‘Evelyn’ was raised at Sissinghurst Castle Gardens and named by the owner, Vita Sackville-West, for one of her many lovers, Evelyn Irons. It’s a superb plant which produces its long tubed, clear pink flowers from November until well into April, if dead headed. Smaller growing, at 40cm tall, with much finer foliage than other varieties, it is far and away my favourite Penstemon.

The Artemisia, a very handsome plant, is grown for the excellence of its flowers whilst most other garden Artemisia such as the wormwoods are grown for their silver foliage. A. lactiflora produces 150cm or so tall, dark green leafy stems the top third of which are many arching sprays of milky white flowers.

Further along the border is a terrific frost hardy Hibiscus. I take it to be a form of the herbaceous Hibiscus moscheutos, the rose mallow, which is a native of wet areas in eastern north America from Texas to Ontario. The form I grow was raised during the 1950s by the late Dennis Norgate who in his Bayswater and Trentham nurseries grew perennial stock in the open field and sold the plants bare rooted. Norgate told me that he stopped growing this Hibiscus in the 1960s because the root system was too big to send by mail. My plant came from a local farmer who got cuttings of the plant from the Deniliquin bowling club gardens in the 1970s. When we moved Lambley from the Dandenongs to Ascot 35 years ago, the farmer gave me a piece. It is a star of the garden at this time of year, growing nearly two metres tall and carrying, for many months, a display of 18cm wide pink flowers with a deeper throat. We do give it extra water as the flowers abort if the plant gets dry.

I love morning glory. When I first arrived in Melbourne, on my 21^st birthday 62 years ago, morning glory covered all the back fences of the then working-class suburbs of Richmond, Fitzroy and Collingwood. Viewed from a passing train it was breathtakingly beautiful. I know it’s a weed in many parts of the country but I still grow it every year because it is obligingly frost tender so not likely to get away here.