Gardening

GARDENING

Weall know the trailing or bushy lobelias used in bedding schemes up and down the country. Their big cousins, the Perennial lobelias are very different and are great plants for borders in asunny spot giving lots of brightly coloured flowers in summer.

The easiest and hardiest perennial ones are varieties of cardinalis and speciosa. These grow from arosette of leaves and send up two to three feet /60-90cm spires of colourful flowers in summer.

Traditionally they are considered to be bog plants. Indeed, they grow wonderfully in moist or wet soilsinsummer and can even succeed at pond edge plants.However, I’ve found that these varieties will also perform well in dry soil, although they don’tgrowquite so tall. We’ve found that they perform wonderfully in full sun in our very well drained soil. These typesare usually winter hardy, although slugscan be a problem in wet soils.

We’ve tried lots of varieties in our garden to find the hardiest. The bright red ‘Bees’ Flame’ also has bronze leaves through the summer as does ‘Russian Princess’ which has shocking pink flowers. ‘Tania’ has multi-coloured leaves in spring, turning to plain greeninsummer and deep pink flowers. Another spring-variegated variety is the lovely palepink ‘Compton Pink.’ ‘Hadspen Purple’ is also very reliable.

The unattractively-named species, siphilitica, is lower growing, bushy and very tough.The basic species has blue flowers, and the variety ‘Alba’ has pure white.

Propagation is best by division in spring. Clumps can be cut up into chunks and replanted. Sometimes it’s possible to divide down to individual rosettes, but these take longertomake good plants.

The less hardy South American varieties of Lobelia are trickier to grow. The most impressive and easy was Lobelia tupa, known as Devil’s Tobacco. This grows to eight feet/240cm tall with flower stems studded with red or orange-red flowers from July to October. It needs very well drained soil in winter. It is easily grown from seed but needshelp getting through its first winter in the ground–adeep mulch or a covering of pine twigs to insulate it. Once established it will survive down to -10 or -14c. We also tried the species bridgesii, polyphylla and laxiflora but these seem to only survive the mildest winters outdoors here.

Janet and Irun Plant Hunters’ Fairs, specialist plantfairs at wonderful locations offering special reduced entry ratesonthe plant fair dates.

For details go online to: www.planthuntersfairs.co.uk.

Martin Blow