My appreciation of a plant is based on two considerations – how it looks and how it performs from year to year. As the moniker Casual Gardener implies, I’m not the most attentive plantsman and at my age much prefer to sit back and enjoy my surroundings rather than spend precious time mollycoddling and footering with fussy plants.
This means most, if not all, of the flowering plants in my garden are either perennials or self-seeding biennials or annuals. I’ve grown many annuals in the past but in recent years other non-horticultural distractions have taken precedence.
It’s therefore left to the stalwarts to provide summer colour – assorted geraniums, oriental poppies, yellow loosestrife, common valerian, Crocosmia ‘Lucifer’ and Persicaria amplexicaulis ‘Fat domino’, to name the key players. The less vigorous and robust will find themselves overwhelmed by the aforementioned and whatever weeds I’m unable to keep in check.
Yet in the midst of this near unbridled chaos, one plant emerges that seems to defy both gravity and the challenging conditions.
Alliums are the quintessential architectural plant, in that they don’t conform to what we think flowers should look like. A member of the onion (ie. Allium) family, the link becomes very apparent if you’ve ever left a leek (Allium ampeloprasum) to fully grow.
At the end of the slender stalks we ordinarily add to our soup or a creamy gratin, a tennis ball-sized pom-pom-like seed head develops. This is essentially what the allium – sometimes called ornamental onions – looks like and, depending on the variety, can be relied upon to appear year after year. Scallions, chives, garlic and onions - red and Spanish both - all follow roughly the same single slim stalk, spherical flowerhead format.
Alliums seem to defy both gravity and challenging conditions
My favourite allium variety of the many available is one of the cheapest and in all likelihood the most common.
‘Purple Sensation’ in full bloom has a stalk approximately 100cm high topped with dozens of lavender purple stars which together form a sphere that will keep its colour for up to a month. Like the leeks that have been left to go to seed, ‘Purple Sensation’ (aka Dutch garlic) makes a nice dried flower. Soil type doesn’t appear to bother them nor does being surrounded by an assortment of nettles, buttercups and scutch grass. Also, for more than a decade, they’ve never been knowingly watered.
I’ve had less favourable returns with the white allium ‘Mount Blanc’, which appeared the year after planting and made a big impact but never came back. Also, I believe I’ve lost the much-treasured ‘Globemaster’, which has bigger, spherical flowers (or again, dozens of flowers making a sphere). It’s most likely the three bulbs have been claimed in dormancy by damp conditions rather then the cold.
In terms of reliability, in my experience Allium cristophii is among the best but I’d argue that its larger, yet more delicate-looking, flowers make it harder to place.
I plan to chance my arm with yellow alliums to grow alongside the ‘Purple Sensation’. The perfect accompaniment would be Allium obliquum, which has bright greeny yellow flowerheads on almost arching stems. However, at almost £8 a bulb, I’d at the very least want a guarantee that it was going to come back for a few years.
A more realistic option is Allium Moly (aka golden garlic or lily leek), which while a little smaller and has open instead of ball-like flower, has good strong colour.
