After a slice of cake and a cup of tea, one of the joys of visiting a garden in summer is the plant sale. Going home with a little of something you liked is often as sweet as the cake. My favourite plants sales are not fancy – the pots might not match and the labels might be recycled from yoghurt pots – but they are full of much-loved plants: playful self-seeders, and tough biennials and perennials that can dodge slugs and snails. There’s often a bargain to put in a gap you’d hoped would have filled out by now. Here are some truly trusted plants to look out for.
There are always plenty of geraniums, common finds that include the tough-as-old-boots G. x oxonianum and its many cultivars, the most likely being ‘Wargrave Pink’, an old standard that produces salmon-pink flowers even in deep shade. This lot are good at muscling out weeds in seemingly impossible locations – not rarefied, sure, but reliable.
Equally good is G. psilostemon, which will self-seed around; its peppy magenta flowers with black centres mean it’s hard to dislike. It can grow up to 1.2 metres tall if it has something to lean on, so is not suitable for small spots, unless you want it to drape itself all over everything else. There’s the slightly meeker cultivar ‘Patricia’ that grows to only 75cm high. If your garden is cast in shade, look out for the lovely feathery foliage of G. clarkei ‘Kashmir White’, with red-veined white flowers that will slowly spread.
The next lot are ubiquitous for a reason – they are easy to love. Lychnis coronaria, with its searing hot-pink flowers above silvery foliage, likes a sunny spot but is unfussy about soil conditions. It works well among irises, where it won’t over-compete, and is much loved by butterflies and bees. There’s a white version for people who don’t do pink.
Knautia macedonica is another that’s sought after by everything that flies and buzzes, and is tolerant of less than wonderful conditions, though it certainly needs some support to stop it flopping. But it’s worth all this for the deep claret-red flowers that float above the plant.
Finally, dame’s violet or sweet rocket, Hesperis matronalis, or the very pretty white variety H. matronalis var. albiflora, does love to dance around the shady spots of the garden and you might end up weeding a fair few out if you don’t cut it back hard after flowering. It has sweet-smelling clusters of violet blooms that are covered in butterflies by day and moths by night, and flowers into August.
