Where To Plant A Potentilla

Colour wheel in a spin

The recent rain has given us heavenly moments in English gardens . The start to the year was so dry and testing but the soil is now workable and everything bedded out is relishing the change. Fascinatingly, the losers are those carefully laid schemes of colour and contrast. Flowers from July are visible with the deadheads on late June’s roses. Nature is teaching us the lesson of the great lady of Anglo-American taste, Nancy Lancaster. “In time,” she would say in her older age, “you’ll learn to like anything with anything.”

I am learning to like strong sky-blue Delphinium Merlin with bronze red heleniums and yellow Jasminum humile revolutum, thankfully unharmed by the hard winter. Blue, bronze and clear yellow are not in gardeners’ approved lists of colour combinations, let alone in the arbitrary ordering of that “colour wheel” which books try to impose on planters. The great Miss Jekyll had only one way of arranging colour, a subtle way of leading up to strong tones by planting neighbouring shades next to them. It looks very pretty, but so do many other ways of doing things and I am not sure that she ever faced our accelerated seasons back in Surrey in the 1890s.

My colour sense is quite elastic, except that I exclude all the purple-rose, mauve-pink and lilac-blue, which interrupts the ornamental grasses in the Piet Oudolf school of landscaping. With such wondrous pure colours to choose from, I marvel how these planters cannot look beyond deep rose-purple cirsiums and pale pinkish-flowered pokeweed. It all looks so stale and leaves me pining for a fine delphinium or a lupin as good as a yellow one called Alan Titchmarsh, which has been one of my joys in June.

What would the grassy fraternity make of my pleasure of the moment, a mixture of white, clear yellow and shades of blue which the weather has brought out all at once?

The main yellow comes from the easy herbaceous Potentilla recta Warrenii, the whites and blues from the exquisite campanulas and yet more lemon-yellow from one of my oldest favourites, little Hypericum olympicum citrinum. Among them are two Clematis durandii with dark velvety blue flowers which are supposed to climb up neighbouring shrubs but which were not pointed in the right direction by my hand in a busy year. None of these plants is at all difficult and they can all be raised so easily from cuttings or seeds.

The potentilla seeds itself very freely and I have had ever more of it in the past 20 years. Its yellow is exceptionally clear and bright, so much so that sensitive souls buy the paler Potentilla recta sulphurea instead. I now prefer ordinary clear yellow Warrenii, a plant which will grow just as well in semi-wild settings where it has to compete with grass.

Potentilla tridentata (three-toothed cinquefoil) « Native plants ...

Also known as, and “potentially” re-classified as Sibbaldiopsis tridentata, this species of cinquefoil grows wild over most of the Northern Hemisphere, including the high arctic regions (i.e. Greenland). Talk about being resilient – the plant can withstand temperatures as low as -40 degrees Fahrenheit, while on the other side of the spectrum it tolerates drought really well. Despite those qualities, the plant is endangered in as many as 5 US states – Connecticut to our south being one of them. Three-toothed cinquefoil will over time grow into a low mat of shiny evergreen leaves. In late spring and summer it produces smallish white flowers. This plant can be used in many different ways – you can put it in a sunny rock garden, or apply it, as I have, as groundcover in your shady woodland garden. I’ve found it to be an easy transplant and adapter of new territory (as opposed to bearberry which in my experience here on Cape Cod often does not survive the winter or will shed leaves or discolor when the soil is too dry or too wet)

We endanger the natural environment partly because we have made so many signs for ourselves, invented the means for so many accelerated directions, cut so many corners, that we have almost forgotten how to converse with it.

And our greed for applications and appliances tends to make us forget that it was the search for truth and not its substitutes that made them possible in the first place.

The ladies' flower-garden of ornamental perennials

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