As regular readers of this column may have noticed, I am no taxonomist. I’ve never quite got on board with Latin names, but have gardened long enough to grudgingly accept that they are quite useful. For all that common names can be poetic (love-in-a-mist), intriguing (bladder wrack) or plain entertaining (goat’s beard), they can lack specificity.
I’m not here to get into the weeds of determining whether one naming system is superior, and I use both interchangeably, but it is true that some Latin names have a certain panache. Crocosmia is among them.
Crocosmia (common name: coppertips, which sounds pleasingly like a jaunty 1950s nickname for a small, possibly naughty child) is a real doer in the garden at this time of year. It’s also not remotely shy, as you’ll know if you have it. It’s a doddle to grow, unfussy about soil and even tolerant of part-shade, so most of its custodians tend to find they have the opposite problem with Crocosmia in their growing space: with its tall, blade-like leaves, it can take over a plot.
If you’re a fan of big, bold, hot colours, it should be in your planting list. Ol’ coppertips has hundreds of cultivars, but as its common name suggests, the vast majority of them are in hues of orange and red. At the more subtle end of things is C. pottsii ‘Culzean Pink’, which is a soft coral orange, with smaller flowers. Alternatively, you could go for the familiar C. ‘Lucifer’, which boasts scarlet flowers in July and August. If you want that level of punch in a tighter space or container, the more modest C. ‘Hellfire’ has bright-red flowers squeezed on to a smaller plant, and tends to be less invasive. There are also yolky yellow versions: ‘Citrone Spray’, which will bloom later into September, or ‘Columbus’.
Personally, I’ve never been able to accommodate one in my own small garden; the colour palette here is a tight pink, white and yellow situation. But when I think of Crocosmia I think of the garden that changed my mind on this plant, which belonged to a late friend and fantastic gardener. She planted it alongside plume poppies (Macleaya cordata), across a wide, deep bed. Everything had enough space, and the arching red sprays of the Crocosmia complemented the soft waft of the poppies’ beautiful fig-leaf foliage. After a summer storm it stood proud, beaded with rainwater. Heaven.
With that in mind, I’d advise that you give Crocosmia its due and give it space. That could be dedicating one massive pot to a few corms (plant them in spring if you don’t want to pick them up as plants from a nursery now), or giving over a lot of a flowerbed. When else do you get the opportunity to let hellfire break loose in the garden?
