Three years ago, a reader kindly sent me some offsets of a spiky Mexican lily called Beschorneria yuccoides.
I was thrilled to receive such a lovely gift. A strikingly architectural, clumping succulent, with yucca-like leaves and spires of small, pink and yellow flowers in early summer, it is frost and drought hardy and not fussy about soil. It looked lovely in the accompanying photo and sounded altogether perfect for a dry, sunny garden.
According to best gardening practice, there are three sites for a new plant: the one that's most suitable, the one that's least suitable and the one where you actually want it to grow.
I put the first in a sunny, sheltered corner containing tough, low care, easy plants where I thought it couldn't fail to thrive. It died shortly afterwards.
The second I planted as the focal point for an area where I'm planning a Mediterranean garden containing mounds of lavender, rosemary and salvias.
This one has done moderately well; it hasn't grown much nor has it flowered but it's alive. So far so good.
The third I squashed into a wildly unsuitable place near a newly planted pear tree, where I could watch it from the verandah and move it if it looked unhappy.
The invaluable Kiwi flaxes (Phormium) are hardy, slow growing and come with numerous variations in size and colour. Readily available, there's one for every garden.
- Fiona Ogilvie
This plant, I need hardly tell you, never looked back.
It grew at ultrasonic speed to approximately 1 metre high and 1.5 metres wide and this spring produced a ginormous flowering stem, more than 2 metres long, that toppled sideways as the flowers opened, like a prehistoric flying reptile.
I'm not sure where I went wrong. I don't think it's supposed to look like this.
Meanwhile, I had come across illustrations of another garden containing B. yuccoides, Les Musgrave's The Kaya at Wildes Meadow that I wrote about last May (The Land, May 23, 2019).
In this skilfully planted garden, it looked well behaved, boasting several upright flowering stems per clump, and providing just the right spiky contrast to mounds of silvery teucrium, salvias, Melianthus major and other glaucous and grey plants.
I'm now hoping mine will produce offsets, or pups as they are affectionately known by Beschorneria lovers, that I can move to my Mediterranean bed.
At present, it's showing no signs of doing this, but I've taken to the idea of spiky plants and am on the lookout for others.
Yuccas are great dry-climate plants and many are frost hardy including the popular Y. filamentosa with creamy flowers.
Y. rostrata is a real beauty, a ball of spikes like a large echidna. It forms a trunk over time and is slow to flower, so is probably at its best for its first five to 10 years. The form 'Sapphire Skies' has intensely blue foliage.
Puya venusta from coastal Chile is also frost hardy, with narrow, forming a 1 metre high by 50 centimetres wide clump of shiny silver leaves edged with wicked little hooked spines.
Finally, the invaluable Kiwi flaxes (Phormium) are hardy, slow growing and come with numerous variations in size and colour. Readily available, there's one for every garden.
