Vertical lines are arresting on wallpaper, a shirt or embodied in skyscrapers on the skyline. They turn run-of-the-mill into something eye-catching. However, there is an art to designing with spires of flowers. Get it wrong and they look out of scale or lonely. Set things right and those lines give borders the tailoring of Designer stripes, bringing structure where there are fewer architectural flowers and providing an all natural way to add height.
Tall, skinny types for example hollyhocks and delphiniums carry everything up top and appear naked unless anchored by other flowers or hard landscape. The plants do naturally provides a good clue as to how to bring out their best self-sown hollyhocks look stunning peeking above picket fences or railings, as does Verbena bonariensis. In a border, it's far better to frame spikes with foam of shorter plants. Geranium psilostemon is good for hiding a delphinium's bare lower stems simply because it flowers the same time, enjoys the identical conditions and doesn't spoil the Delphi's point.
There are exceptions. Verb scum bombyciferum, featuring its woolly spikes and yellow saucer petals, gets away with growing by itself because its large silver basal leaves visually anchor it to your spot and the leaves diminish since they rise, giving it the shape connected with an up-turned ice-cream cone. Perfect when left to self-sow among pebbles within a coastal scheme.
Sadly, delphiniums don't suit my Devon garden. Even just in my last home in Cambridge shire I had been disappointed by the way their presence was so short-lived the blue spike come and elapsed midsummer. I always think the farther north you garden; the higher quality they get as the flowers hold for longer. Hence here I have traded them looking for the longer-lasting spires of Cerium pin nana. Hailing in the Canary Islands, this plant reaches 15ft or higher and has the same ability to lure bees. A biennial naturally, it should be coaxed through its first winter, and will produce blue spires shaped like folded parasols. From an initial spring sowing a short while ago, I have a few self-seeding each year, making groves round the place that the mother plant stood.
Spires doesn't have to be tall and single to include architecture to a border. Lower-growing perennials, which produce spires in candelabra-like clumps, look impeccable repeated in a phalanx think of the way foxgloves and rosebay willow herb colonies forest glades, their spears rising and falling like peaks on the cardiogram. Repeating clumps in this way will take the same reassuring rhythm for your borders.
Dutch designer Piet Rudolf mixes a naturalistic palette of ornamental grasses with Liars pi ata, Salvia Nekoosa as well as graceful wands of Veronica strum virginicum 'Album'. Sometimes the roles are reversed plus the grasses claim the attention, much like the upright sheaves of Calamagrostis' Karl Forester', a tidy six-footer for any small sunny border.
Snapdragons is one of my favorites for summer borders. Even if they are child's play growing doesn't mean they aren't fabulous annuals. Their spikes knit together planting schemes, filling out the gaps when early summer performers catmints and cranesbills become weary. We have two favorites worth sowing now for summer: 'Black Prince', with moody red flowers over sanguine leaves the greater sun they get, the darker the foliage, so partner with silver Mediterranean shrubs including starchy and lavender; and the graceful Antirrhinum 'Royal Bride', with white flowers that will make meringue-like peaks, lovely with the creamy scented flowers of Nicotine Sylvester's. Occasional deadheading's all snapdragons need to keep the blooms coming all summer.
If you're thinking about hiding an ugly fence with tall flowers, listen to me and do something about the fence instead tall flower-spikes gain nothing from your shabby backdrop. One of my all-time favorite flower-fence combinations are foxtail lilies, especially the apricot Erasures x isabellinus 'Cleopatra', glowing in front of black clapboard shed. I grow mine in groups and so the flower spikes are easier to spot (and fewer likely to be trampled), in soil improved with gravel, with sprawling Artemisia 'Polis Castle' nearby to camouflage the scrappy basal foliage. Keep watered in dry springs with organic slug pellets by June it will be 1.5m tall. The effect, similar to a firework, burns hot and fast. Whether it is over, cut down the dead spike and plant lime-green nicotine to spearhead the display into autumn.
Copyright 2011 by Joan, who is a woman writer and always writes about a variety of fashion woman products includings coach handbags and human hair extensions.
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