Going large
“You must have a lovely big garden,” enthused the woman from the National Trust shop. I didn’t, but I didn’t want to disappoint her by saying “no”.
It was back in 1990, at the plant sales shop for one of the big National Trust country houses in Devon and I’d just bought my very first crambe cordifolia. It wasn’t intended for my own garden in Surbiton, it was destined for the French house in Brittany, the place I’d bought to be the home of ‘big stuff’.
I’ve always been a fan of ‘big stuff’ in the garden. Freudian analysis would no doubt trace this tendency back to my childhood overexposure to the pantomime ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’.
Buying the crambe wasn’t my first dalliance with large-leaved space fillers. I’d already got myself a rheum palmatum, the Chinese rhubarb. These produce gunnera-like leaves, but didn’t require (or so I believed) the misty moisty kind of environment that gunneras thrive in. The children also looked very cute wandering round the garden holding the leaves.
This is Theo, aged two at the time (now 23), having an immense amount of fun with a pile of rheum leaves. They were big enough to play hide-and-seek underneath, or could be built into a small house. And notice the fine condition I’ve managed to keep them in.
After installing a big-leaved perennial where else would you go than to a towering biennial. I ordered some echium pininana seed from One World Seeds and germinated quite a few. The first year they sat around doing very little, but in the second they sent up enormous flower spikes around 3.5 metres tall! There wasn’t a cane in Old Horace’s garden centre that could approach them. Luckily they were fairly rigid, and it was like having an enormous verbascum in your garden.
Indian Bean Trees produce fairly large leaves, and glorious flower pannicles, and I managed to get a very advanced one from Old Horace which didn’t break the bank. My next door neighbour noticed it in the second year and complained to the council that it was going to undermine her foundations. It had to go. I dug the root ball up and transported it to France where it spent many happy years on the corner of the lane acting as the pole on which the farmer tied his baler twine to guide the cows down the lane.
In fact it got so established that it grew bark over the baler twine, which is now embedded firmly in the trunk.
After we moved away from the Indian-bean-hating-neighbour in Surbiton I invested in a couple of pawlonia tomentosa. They are also known as the foxglove tree and when mature produce beautiful, large heart-shaped leaves. I love them as much for the scale of the foliage as anything else. Sadly they just got up to being a decent size and we moved house again.
All this time, from 1990 up until 2015, the crambe that I originally planted in Brittany had been expanding, getting chopped back, being eaten away to nothing by les escargots rapide, divided and moved. When an opening came in my present garden I chopped two quarters out of the host plant and stuck them in the ground them back in Surbiton.
It’s testament to the vigour of the original plant that after getting sliced and diced in late March, that by the beginning of June they have recovered and thrown out new flowers (top pic). My only sadness is that no matter how much I ask him, my 23-year-old won’t pose for a retrospective photo of him holding a large leaf. Kids, huh.
