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What is your favourite plant?
Garden noob
Posts: 260
in Plants
Looking for a bit of inspiration, I'm interested to know your favourite plants and why. Bonus points if you provide pictures.
I'll kick it off:
1) Cyclamen coum
Pretty delicate flowers and beautiful leaf markings in the cold dark months when little else wants to grow. Currently they're really cheering me up.
2) Geranium Rozanne
Gorgeous blue/purple flowers, easy to grow, and feel like they really earn a space in my small garden by flowering for up to 6 months. Sadly not the best photo - it should have more flowers.
0
Posts
go on, have a guess.
Many many favourites ; one of the best 'alpines' in the Spring :- Jeffersonia dubia ; reddish hepatica like leaves and almost luminous blue flowers ; stunning plant .
Last edited: 03 February 2018 10:18:50
Impossible to choose! There are so many that can lift my heart.
I love all the daisy family, they are all so cheery.
The first crocuses, opening their hearts to the sun, the reptilian buds of Crocosmia Lucifer and its vibrant flowers.
The old stalwarts, like wallflower Bowles' Mauve and hardy geraniums, that can always be relied on.
The fine detail of Pulsatillas or saxifrage, the brashness of Dahlias, the complexity and perfume of old roses.
My little Soldanella, living happily in a trough, that takes me back to the day I found one emerging from the last remnant of snow in a rock crevice, on a walk high up near the Furka Pass in Switzerland.
Almost anything in the garden really, when I stop and look at it properly - even the weeds : you have to admire their tenacity
Although have a weakness for big showy roses and trees in general, There are two plants in paricular I love. Malus Sun Rival which is a weeping crabapple, and Lonicera periclymenum Belgica (early Dutch honeysuckle).
Plants that love my garden: Hebe.
This may seem an odd choice, but I think I'd have to say ivy. It will grow (and then some) almost anywhere, survive any amount of neglect, hides eyesores, gives colour all year round, provides food and shelter for birds, pollinators, invertebrates and small mammals, and is easy to propagate. Granted, in its natural form it's a bit sombre, but breeders have produced 100+ varieties of leaf shape, colour, markings and growth habit, there's something there to suit every garden and every gardener.
And if you make me choose my favourite flower?. Nuisance though they can be in a garden, I think the world would be a poorer place without dandelions giving us their golden cheeriness for ten months a year. And their scent, which many people have never even noticed. Pick a flower that's had the sun on it all afternoon, put it to your nose, close your eyes and inhale deeply, it's the distillation of summer. And have you seen the price the young leaves fetch in a French greengrocer's? If dandelions were rare and difficult to grow, we'd all be crazy about them.
My favourite plant changes from month to month but at the moment it is daphne odora. I look forward to it flowering this time every year as the scent is so intoxicating!
As I am still quite new to gardening I'm constantly discovering new plants and my favourite discovery from last year was probably Anemone Bordeaux. Amazing depth of colour - the photo here doesn't really do it justice:
My favourite changes depending on what looks good at the moment. Just now it's the wee helibore niger with it's lovely white flowers. Next week it'll be the miniature irises which are popping through the ground and shortly after that it'll be the big purply-red helibores which are about to start flowering.
I wouldn't be without a geranium or three, I have a wee alba which hopefully has survived the winter along with brookside and a couple of others.