A friend tells a sweet story about her mother, whose London garden is one of the most beautiful I’ve seen. An émigré from Sri Lanka, she arrived in the English countryside barely out of her teens and carefully tended an unknown plant for weeks, patiently awaiting the day it would bloom. When it did, she was delighted by its bright yellow sunburst of a flower. In time she learned the name of it: dandelion.
We remember our first encounter with some plants, but others seep more slowly into our consciousness. Take verbascums: I have developed a creeping fondness for these flowers over the years, tickled by the way they turn up unannounced.
There was the soft yellow volunteer that arrived in a pot of a now-forgotten plant I picked up at a neighbourhood sale and gently took over that corner of the bed, a glowing spire beneath the plum tree. The next summer, I fell for Verbascum ‘Helen Johnson’, in Jo Thompson’s wildlife garden for the RHS at Hampton Court flower show: dusky coral pink ruffles surrounded a dark pink crown, swaying elegantly among hot pink salvias.
These days I enjoy spotting the rogue wild cultivar (V. thapsus) – the bright yellow greater mullein, with its lovely fuzzy grey-tinged foliage – popping up in the park and corners of gardens other plants didn’t fancy. It’s also known as moth mullein: caterpillars eat the leaves, carder bees use the fuzz for nests and bees and hoverflies flock to the flowers.
The shorter, more tamed versions are good in a garden – in fact, I wish I had planted more. The V. phoeniceum ‘Flush of White’ plugs I picked up from the Botanic Nursery stall at Chelsea last year didn’t get on with my sheltered, north-facing bed or gravel garden experiment. The soil was right (poor and free-draining) but I planted them too close to the fence and ideally they need full sun. Give them enough space and there’s a riot of colour to be had. V. phoenicium ‘Violetta’ (dark purple) and V. ‘Blue Lagoon’ are more container-friendly.
As biennials – plants that take two years to grow into full flowering form – verbascums are best planted in March and April as plugs. But they’re in flower now and can continue to be until October if you stumble on some at a garden centre. Let them go to seed and you’ll have a dramatic silhouette of seed heads. (Be aware that while the wild version self-seeds merrily, hybrids tend to be sterile.)
It’s warm enough to sow direct, where they will gain good ground as the weather cools. Before they flower, they make a neat rosette of leaves that promises growth in winter. Something unassuming but defiant – not unlike a dandelion out of bloom.
