Nothing shy about wallflowers

BOLD STATEMENT: Wallflowers bring fragrance and colourful contrasts to the garden. Picture: Alice Rosen, flickr

BOLD STATEMENT: Wallflowers bring fragrance and colourful contrasts to the garden. Picture: Alice Rosen, flickr

Published Oct 14, 2015

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Johannesburg - Wallflowers (Erysimum sp.) can be grown as perennials, depending on the species, but in harsh winter areas (read: freeze your butt off in ice and snow) they’ll more likely be treated as annuals or biennials.

For those not up on their garden lingo, annuals are plants that complete their life cycle seedling to seed-maker in one year – like tomatoes. Perennials are those flowers that come back year after year. Biennials are weird little plants that sprout from seed one year, grow, grow, grow, die back in the winter, sprout again the next spring, grow, grow, grow, bear seeds and then die. The “bi” refers to “two” meaning it takes the plant two years to complete its life.

The basic wallflower has yellow flowers and will seed itself and grow enthusiastically in seemingly solid walls and stone – hence the name. They like good drainage – think of a dry wall – and suffer badly if they sit all winter in wet ground. Wallflowers prefer full sun, grow in most soil types and will tolerate part shade.

So how do you take care of these things? To tell you the truth, you don’t have to do much.

Although they are hardy it is a good idea to pinch out the growing tips when you plant them to create bushy plants and to get rid of any late, vigorous growth that will be hit by early frosts. They prefer moist (not soggy) soil, but watering them deeply once a week in the summer (or twice if it’s a scorcher) is really all they need to get by. It is a mistake to overfeed the soil, which will only make for this late spurt of growth and, of course, you should never give wallflowers any kind of fertiliser.

After they bloom in the spring, give them a whack with the hedge clippers. By mid-summer, they’ll be blooming again and these blooms last into autumn. After this, you can clip them again to tidy them up or let them go to seed to see what colours end up in your garden.

Wallflowers are brassicas and are liable to all the problems of the humblest cabbage, be it clubroot, cabbage root fly, flea beetle or mealy aphids. But give them alkaline soil and grow them hard so they put their energy into producing flowers, not lush growth, and they should be perfectly healthy. Then, when they have finished flowering, pull them all up and pop them on the compost heap.

Erysimum cheiri fact sheet: An exotic southern European plant with fragrant yellow, orange-red, dark red, or brown flowers that bloom in early spring and through summer. It is evergreen, has strappy, ornamental leaves and grows to about 80cm tall and 50cm wide. It prefers partial sun or dappled shade and is fairly hardy and needs average watering.

This succulent, erect biennial is not suggested for coastal planting.

It is a high-impact and easy-to-grow wallflower, with deep scarlet flowers from March to May. Plants form a rosette of leaves in the year of sowing and then flower in spring the following year.

They grow to a height of 30-45cm and look good grown in groups in a border and in containers.

The plants have an attractive spicy clove-like scent. Sow seeds in spring or summer. Grow alongside the wallflower “orange bedder” for great contrasting orange and red colours – a fairly hardy hybrid that is coastal-friendly and has particularly attractive flowers in almost every colour imaginable.

This variety is grown as a perennial.

l Don’t miss Melanie in Gardening 101 on the Home Channel (DStv 176) on Tuesdays at 9pm, with seven repeats throughout the week.

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