Five feet tall, flowering from midsummer to frost, and wearing whiskers. The spider flower — cleome — is the cottage garden’s firework: globe after globe of pink, white and violet blossoms whose stamens stream out like spider legs and Catherine wheels, opening fresh blooms at the top of the spike while the slender seed pods…
At noon on a sunny late-spring day it is a constellation at ground level: dozens of pure white six-pointed stars, green-striped underneath, open flat to the sun — and by dusk, or on a cloudy morning, they have folded themselves away like the sky closing. Star of Bethlehem is the spring bulb with heaven in…
The florist’s secret weapon smells like cloves and candlelight. Stock — tall spikes of ruffled double flowers in white, lilac, rose and wine — is the wedding bouquet’s backbone and the evening garden’s perfume, a cabbage-family wallflower from the Mediterranean cliffs that breeders have spent four centuries turning into the perfect cut flower. This guide…
One name, two famous flowers, and no end of confusion at the florist. “Mimosa” is the golden, honey-scented acacia cloud that floods Italian streets every March 8th — and also the little pink powderpuff whose leaves fold shut when you touch them. Both are wonderful; they are not the same plant, and which one you…
A flower you smell before you see: lily of the valley perfumes whole corners of the May garden from bells the size of thimbles, white as wedding cake, sweet as anything in perfumery — and poisonous through and through. It is the flower of royal bouquets and French May Day streets, Finland’s national emblem, and…
For three weeks each spring, ancient woods in Britain and Ireland turn the colour of deep water: millions of nodding violet bells, a scent you can smell before you see them, on stems that arch like fishing rods. The English bluebell is half the world’s bluebells in one archipelago — and a protected wild plant,…
Fireworks that never fall: an allium globe hangs over the late-spring border for weeks — hundreds of tiny star-flowers packed into one perfect sphere, on a stem bare as a drumstick. Then it dries, standing, into a sculpture that lasts the rest of the year. All this from the onion family, which is why deer…
Spires of peas in every colour a cottage garden dreams in — blue, pink, cream, sunset-orange, and two tones stacked on a single spike: the lupine is the flower that taught poor soil to behave like a feast. As a legume it pulls its own nitrogen from the air, feeds the ground it stands in,…
One week the lawn is winter-brown, the next it is spangled with purple, gold and white goblets pushing straight through the frost — the crocus does not wait for spring, it announces it. And its autumn cousin carries the most expensive spice on earth in three red threads per flower. The smallest bulb in the…
A white woolly star that grows where almost nothing else dares — on limestone cliffs two miles above the sea, in blizzards of ultraviolet light. Edelweiss is the Alps made into a flower: the badge of mountain troops, the coin in Austrian pockets, the love-token young men once risked cliffs to fetch, and the song…
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