Bergenia Back in Favour in the Garden For All Seasons - by Sally Gregson We, the gardeners of these beautiful islands, are a fickle lot. Our taste in plants changes season to season, year on year. And once-popular plants are all too often, like yesterday’s news, discarded in our quest for something different. But occasionally someone turns their attention back to such plants, seeing in them that which made them once popular, and improving on it. Just such a turn of events has happened to the humble bergenia, the once-loved Elephant’s Ears of cottage gardens.Perhaps its original popularity owed something to its extensive use by that doyenne of turn-of-the-century gardeners, Gertrude Jekyll. At Hestercombe Gardens near Taunton in Somerset, Jekyll used bergenias to edge the triangular beds of the Great Plat: their large, deepgreen leaves underscoring the formality of the pattern. She would use them too as punctuation marks to conclude a run of planting, turn a corner and soften hard-edged walls and shady rockeries. They act as a foil for summer planting, and then shout into life in autumn with reddening foliage and strong pink flowers in spring. Maybe they were over-used by her successors. Maybe their big leaves seemed heavy and dusty. Or maybe that particular shade of puce was just a bit tasteless as a counterfoil for yellow daffodils. But over the past few years there has been an explosion of interest especially in their use in the winter garden. Their glossy leaves are architectural, yet low-growing. Their brilliant foliage colours: ox-blood red, purple and scarlet; ignite the stark monochrome of winter. And the flowers of new varieties are more emphatic and stand well above the foliage. While our backs have been turned the plant breeders have worked to improve the whole plant. It started in the 1970s when the late Eric Smith bred a race of bergenias named after composers beginning with the letter ‘B’. Some are barely still with us, while others have found lasting favour. Bergenia ‘Beethoven’ has proved the most enduringly popular with its dwarf habit. It grows to a mere 25cm (10ins) with large, pure white flowers from coral-red calyces. Bergenia ‘Bach’ has huge heads of palest pink flowers that fade white. And contrarily the white calyces become redder as they age.  At Bressingham Gardens in Norfolk the late Alan Bloom and his son, Adrian bred some fine varieties selected for leaf colour and flower. Among them B. ‘Bressingham Ruby’ with rich pink flowers at 30cm (1ft) over big red leaves: one of the best archetypical bergenias. And B. ‘Bressingham White’ is yet to be superseded for its large white flowers. The bright, cold days of autumn will turn the foliage into a kaleidoscope of red, pink, yellow and green.Continuing in the musical spirit, B. ‘Overture’ has to be among the most remarkable of the more recently introduced bergenias. Its foliage becomes a wonderful deep, chestnut red at the onset of the cold weather and clashes uproariously with coloured-stem willows and orange heaths (Calluna spp.). Then in early spring it produces tall vermillion stalks crowned with the most electrifying magenta flower-heads imaginable. It takes no prisoners. But it too makes you smile. From Holland come two new forms with curling coloured leaves. Those of B. ‘Eden’s Magic Giant’ are more softly textured with ruffled edges and a pink bloom that intensifies in winter. The flowers are large and a companionable deep pink. And B. ‘Eden’s Dark Margin’ has bright red undersides to the leaves that turn the strongest red of all, and it produces gorgeous, dark pink flowers from magenta calyces. Quite unlike the majority of the tribe, B. ciliata pushes up fleshy coral-pink stems crowned with palest pink flowers in spring before the emergence of its foliage. Then the large, softly hairy, heart-shaped leaves follow in a gentle apple green tinged with pink. It needs a little more protection from winter wet and cold than its cousins, and a warm sunny spot. But the evergreen varieties are easy to grow in almost any conditions with perhaps the exception of extreme wet. And having made the winter garden a brighter place, they burst into flower with vim and verve in early spring. Just spare them the company of bright yellow daffodils! Sally Gregson runs Mill Cottage Plants at Wookey. www.millcottageplants.co.uk) |