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It’s alive!
We pride ourselves on the hardiness of our plants. We are very careful to ensure that everything that makes it onto our sales benches is absolutely ready for the big outdoors, and we are very catholic in our plant selections, to the extent that many varieties of “hardy” plants simply don’t get onto our stock list.
Sometimes customers find this difficult to understand. We had a conversation with a customer last weekend which went something like :
Customer : “Do you have any Phormiums?”
Us : “No, we don’t find them reliably hardy”
Customer : (slightly quizzical) “Oh!?” (and then with a hint of indignation) “I’ve had one in my garden for several years”
Us: “Maybe you have it in a warm spot…?”
Customer “Yes….it is quite sheltered….against a south facing wall….I wrap it with chicken wire, straw and fleece every winter…but last winter saw it off, so I want another!”
Of course we have no problem with this sort of gardening; if you want a ”Mediterranean” garden, and are willing to go to those sorts of lengths to get one, that’s absolutely cool with us. We just don’t like having to care for those sorts of plants on the nursery, or explaining to less knowledgeable customers that they’ll have to go to those sorts of lengths to keep their plants alive.
Gaura Ballerina Rose
But we also like to make sure our plant range is as wide as it can be, and we are constantly experimenting to see how maybe-marginally-hardy perennials behave with us. As a result, our range includes one French lavender, one Osteospermum, one Ceanothus (and even that is under review following last winter!) and until now, no Gaura.
Gaura are always listed as perennials in the catalogues and encyclopedias, but the sage advice has been to treat them as annuals. Henk Gerritsen and Piet Oudolf refused them inclusion in their book Dream Plants for the Natural Garden with an explanatory footnote describing them as “…wonderful…but you have to buy a new batch every year.” And Gaura lindheimii, frankly, isn’t a very garden worthy plant. It’s gawky habit, washed out pinky-white flowers, and tendency to develop (characteristic, normal, but rather unsettling) purple leaf spots meant it managed only a cameo appearance on our plant list a few years ago, and the genus has been off our radar ever since.
But the breeders have been busy! A number of new cultivars have been launched in recent years, and tempted by some of the more lurid descriptions in the catalogues, we decided to try a batch last year. And we like them! The leaf spots have been bred out, but the colour has been retained, so you get a rather fetching clump of purple-green foliage, and in high summer they’re topped with lots and lots of pink butterfly flowers. Prompt dead heading will get you a second flush of blooms a few weeks later. And here comes the good bit – they appear to be really hardy!
The picture shows new growth on a plant that has overwintered in our back garden (there are 2 others, not in the picture, which look equally good). We have a group of five in our (rather more exposed) front garden, which are also doing well. Given the winter we’ve just experienced, we feel confident in declaring these guys well and truly hardy!
Our suspicion is that they may not be very long lived perennials (because the older varieties weren’t) but we’ll have to wait to see if the breeders have managed to eliminate those genes too.
In the meantime they’re looking like really garden worthy plants, so if you’ve been hankering after Gaura, but have been wary of their hardiness, have a go with these guys.