Red Hot Pokers

Looking over the fence at my neighbours Red Hot Pokers!

Poking around through the Fence

I don’t have the usual photograph in this week’s article with me in the foreground.  I generally like to get my face in the Inishowen Indo every week but today I have been pointing the camera lens in the opposite direction towards my neighbours garden.

I started off earlier looking at a space where Julie cleared of rubbish and old shrubs and wondering if there was enough room to create a forest garden. It’s a bit ambitious of me, but I was influenced by a documentary I watched earlier about someone who grows enough food to last a family of four for every one of his 6 acres. What made this even more impressive is that he claims to spend less than ten days a year managing the land. I spend more time than that getting my tools out of the garage.

I decided that 3 square metres wasn’t going to be enough to plant nut trees, fruit bushes, ground cover berries and have the perfect eco system, so my attention wandered over the fence to my neighbour’s grand display of flaming red hot pokers and montbretia or crocosmia as they are also known. 

Montbretia

The variety of montbretia they have is the ‘Lucifer’ and it is one of the brightest flowers on the market. We usually see the common orange types growing wild on the roadsides near farms or in the countryside where desperate gardeners have resorted to throwing them out of their car windows in a desperate attempt to get the invasive corms out of their herbaceous borders. They probably fail as leaving just one corm in the ground will soon spread and take over again.  The plants can look great if you have big borders and the flowers are good for cutting because they last a long time in water.  They have their place I suppose and do look very pretty in the sunshine but don’t take your eye off them.  

Red Hot Pokers

The red hot pokers growing in next doors garden are the tallest ones I have ever seen, maybe I should have stood next to them to give a bit of perspective, but I can tell you that they are taller than me and I am 6’, a bit less now as I seem to be shrinking with age, but you get the idea. 

Knipfolia, to give the red hot pokers their real name, or torch lily in America, are really easy to grow.  They can be grown from seed but the favoured method is by dividing up the rhizome (bulbous roots) in late autumn and setting the cut pieces into pots or a well drained spot in the garden.  They can be grown from seed as well but this is a lot slower and fiddly. If you do plant seeds from an existing plant after they have dried on the plant in autumn and put them in a frost free place to germinate in spring. 

Red hot pokers are really showy and this helps to attract a wide variety of insects throughout the summer.  Bees, butterflies and birds all gather around the rocket shaped flowers.  The plant is an ideal addition to dry spots in the garden that get full sun. You will see these plants thriving where others droop and wither in the heat.

Facebook Friends

Having amassed about 3000 friends on Facebook, I am always amazed at the high quality of images that I see every day of peoples gardens.  I’m not in the garden design business any more but if I was I would never be short of inspiration and ideas from people all over the world who have designed and built places of real beauty.  One a daily basis I look at images so varied from tiny details like putting glass marbles into holes in wooden fences to catch the sunlight to massive landscaping projects that take years to create.  One of my favourites at the moment is the giant wooden clothes peg, which is probably twenty feet high ‘nipping’ the ground where it is stood on grassland in a park.  The whole design looks so realistic and delicate although it would have taken a digger a few days to move the tonnes of soil to get the impression of the clothes peg pulling the ground up.

I know I can spend a little bit too much time on the computer in the evenings looking at other peoples creations but I find it truly rewarding and there’s a saying about how you are who you associate with. Hopefully the fabulous global design elements will rub off on me and I will come up with a perfect miniature forest garden at the back of the garage, take a photo of it and share it around the world and have people say “Why didn’t I think of that!”