The May Cutting Garden
Have you been watching the Chelsea Flower Show this week? Perhaps you fought your way through the crowds on the site itxelf. Several of the good folks who came to our gardening club plant sale yesterday were keen on the idea of naturalistic planting and pops of colour. Planting for pollinators all year roundis much more popular these days. Those of us who grew up with cottage gardens, where veg nestled cheek by jowl with cutting garden flowers would have felt right at home at Chelsea this year. May really is a great time for a flower show and a plant sale.
"May is the month of expectation, the month of wishes, the month of hope" wrote Emily Brontë and that is certainly true in my garden. Whilst the spring bulbs have gone over, everything is lush and green. Perennials are reappearing to fill every available space; there are plenty of seedlings to plant out; the dahlias are underway; paeonies are blooming and, if I’m lucky (or vigilant), the roses are free of blackspot and greenfly for a while.
Best of all though are the pockets of purple and white where the honesty (lunaria annua) is blooming. If dahlias in vibrant jewel colours are my favourites, then the humble Honesty comes a very close second. As a child I remember there being lots of it growing in clumps under the apple trees in our rambling garden and being a great place to spot butterflies and bees. It’s a useful caterpillar food plant for the orange-tip butterfly. The common name 'honesty' refers to the frankness of the plant in displaying its seeds in their transparent pods and in the language of flowers, unsurprisingly, it represents sincerity.
Such an easy-going, generous plant, it self-seeds prolifically and lasts for ages. A low-maintenance plant, it doesn’t require feeding or cutting back; in fact it’s perfect for a cottage garden border and a brilliant plant for children to grow. Allow plants to go to seed in the Autumn, when they become magical, moon-like discs which look wonderful in the winter garden. Harvest a few pods for sowing next year, more for drying because they look better in an everlasting arrangement before they have been ravaged by the weather but leave some on the plant to provide winter interest.
One of Honesty’s alternative names is Moonwort, the dried silvery oval pods being especially evocative of the Moon. Another is Money plant because of the seedpod’s resemblance to a silver coin. Keeping one in your purse will attract fortune, legend says. I don’t know if that’s true but it’s worth a try. Herblore also suggests that it keeps away monsters, demons and evil spirits, can open door locks, break chains and unshoe horses that tread on it. That’s quite the claim for such a simple flower.
Honesty seedpods look great dried in a vase, but they are also ideal for craft projects with children. Glue the empty pods onto a jam jar, overlapping beautifully and you’ll have a beautiful tealight holder. Victorian middle-class housewives would paint little scenes on the silvery pods apparently. They must have had better eyesight than me!
You sow it in the summer to flower the following spring. Sow in pots or a seed tray in June and transplant into larger pots when plants are large enough to handle. Plant out into their final growing positions in the autumn. As honesty is biennial it has a large taproot and therefore is best planted out when young; larger plants tend not to establish as well as younger ones. It thrives in fertile, moist and well-drained, slightly alkaline soil and does best in partial shade. Pair it with spring-flowering bulbs like tulips or as part of a spring woodland border with foxgloves, forget-me-nots and ferns. I have just the place under a laburnum in the front garden.