WEEKEND COLUMNISTS  |
| The British Delphinium Society’s border at Godinton House |
On calm, sunny days, delphiniums have been the sight of the past fortnight. I cannot imagine why they ever became identified with laborious out-of-date gardening. They are one of the wonders of a gardener’s world. They are far more spectacular than ornamental grass and clumps of knotweed in a fashionable prairie planting. They are also extremely obliging in return for a few little bits of attention, which makes me even fonder and prouder of them.
It has taken me a while to accept the FT-compatible truth about this family, which is that with delphiniums you get only what you pay for. If you buy unnamed seedlings or mixed hybrids with names such as Galahad or King Arthur you will have merely respectable second-class results. The flower spikes will be relatively short and the flowers will fade quite quickly up the length of the stem. However, if you buy named prize-winning forms such as the cream Butterball or the deep Blue Nile you will pay twice as much but you will be rewarded many times over. The spikes are longer and better-furnished and the lower flowers will not have dropped before the upper flowers have even opened. The colour and shape puts cheaper varieties to shame. The pricey ones are no more difficult to grow. They cost more because they have to be raised from cuttings off a mature parent of the same name.
Long delphinium borders still haunt the experts’ eyes. At Godinton House, near Ashford in Kent, the British Delphinium Society has planted a magnificent example beside the local old brick walls. It is open to the public in the afternoon, Thursday to Monday, and is as good of its kind as you can hope to see. There will be a few late flowers as July advances and, if the first crop is thoroughly dead-headed, there will be a second showing in early autumn.
The problem is that these long, exclusive borders look drab in the intervening weeks. I much prefer to mix a few individual delphiniums as focal points in a varied border. In relatively small beds they can stand alone as individuals without having to go in the very back row in conventional groups of three or five. When they flower, they draw the eye but as soon as they fade they are dead-headed and lost once again in an emerging haze of asters and late summer daisies. Used in this way they do not leave you with a mildewed and messy back row throughout most of July and all of August. A strong delphinium will tolerate neighbours but it must have a circle of about 3ft in diameter entirely to itself.
One of the happier sights at recent Chelsea Flower Shows has been the return to form of the traditional specialists in delphiniums, Blackmore & Langdon of Stanton Nurseries, Pensford, Bristol. The company’s season for sending out young plants has just ended but you can pre-book for next April, reckoning to pay about £7 for what will only be a rooted little plant from a 9cm pot. In the first year you might have a flower or two but only at a fraction of the plant’s eventual height. If possible, I grow on new arrivals in a well-manured bed and then transplant them for their second, more glorious season.
As the recent winter proved yet again, even the biggest and finest delphiniums are unaffected by frost. When they have died down in winter their enemy is not cold but the tireless slug. These hungry pests are still active below soil level when you cannot see them. Always leave slug bait around a delphinium from November to March.
They will grow in dry conditions but are far better in ground that does not tend to harden like a hot brick. Traditionally, they were planted in soil that had been dug with animal manure and was then topdressed with more rotted manure to keep in dampness. The nutrients of the manure can be given more effectively nowadays by adding a slow-release fertiliser such as Vitax Q-4 to the planting-hole or to the soil round an established plant’s neck. It makes all the difference to named varieties, which have to put so much energy into their main season. Dampness can then be conserved by a separate mulch of bark or compost around the plant. Many of the best results come from artificially fed delphiniums in beds with artificial irrigation systems. There is no special magic in “organic” methods.
Here are some extra-special varieties, noted at the Chelsea shows and often proven in my own borders. Celebration is a lovely cream-white with a dark eye and Sandpiper is a classic white with a black eye as a contrast. Blue Nile has a charming white eye and Pandora is a bright mid-blue with a blue-and-black eye. All these fabulous forms are offered now by Blackmore & Langdon, as is the softer blue Pericles with its white eye. Pericles appeals to me particularly because of its namesake, the great political leader of classical Athens.
In May I left the Chelsea Flower Show to go directly to the Greek TV studios in Athens for the hugely hyped finals of the nation’s vote for the greatest Greek ever. Pericles had made it into the top 10 but his delphinium-of-honour was not mentioned in his sponsor’s speech. Even with it he would never have won. I was sponsoring Alexander the Great and, with an interpreter to help me, he won by a distance. I am happy to keep Pericles in the garden instead, where his namesake is truly first-class.
Amateur breeders have developed many other winners and they are worth hunting down in the Royal Horticultural Society’s Plantfinder. A slug has finally slaughtered my beloved Clifford Sky, a form with an intensely clear sky-blue flower on a very long spike. I am consoling myself with the free-flowering Merlin, a clear blue too, with a white eye. There are dozens more and this week is still a time to see many of them at their British best.
What about the staking and tying? They were used as reasons for banishing delphiniums from “labour-saving” gardens, as if we could never enjoy this brief, yearly task. Admittedly, I leave it late, until the first buds are opening and the ground is usually hardened by a dry spell. Some of the necessary bamboo canes always break when I first try to poke them into the surrounding soil but even this regular setback has an anticipated rhythm. When a cane finally stands for every one or two flower spikes and the green twine is circling each stem, I feel really pleased at the sight of this orderliness, achieved within an hour.
Use the most highly priced delphiniums as individual focal points and you will make a strong impact with so much less to tie up. When their spikes fade, the canes come out too and the second flowering, if any, is usually slighter and better able to support itself. The delphinium never deserved to become a symbol of laborious gardening. Think of its few needs as pleasant variations in the usual round of weeding and deadheading. We have banished it too often for the wrong reasons.
