the trouble with echiums

This is the photo of my garden in the current guide to Australia's open gardens. It was taken last October.

The foreground features twin towers of flowering Echium candicans 'Heronswood Blue.' In front of the echium are masses of parsley in various stages of seeding. On the left you see a hint of pink wallflower blooms - Erysimum cheiri 'Winter Joy'.

None of these 3 plants are growing there now.

The OGA (Open Gardens Australia) coordinator requested a photo taken around the same time as the garden would be open. I dutifully complied. It was a sensible idea, presumably because visitors would have an idea what to expect. Except, in my case, that part of the garden no longer looks like that.

Instead it looks like this.

It's an example of the continually evolving nature of this kind of gardening.  Here's how it happened.

Firstly the parsley grew, seeded itself and died, just as it was supposed to, leaving a gap. The gap could have been filled by new parsley plants but I left them to their own devices and they appear to have moved to another part of the garden.

Secondly - an explanation of the fate of the wallflower. That particular specimen had been thriving in that position for about a decade.  During that time it flowered profusely for most of the year. By last summer its beauty was ravaged by age. It was no longer an attractive shape, and was sparse and leggy.  I cut it back and it started to re-grow - but too slow, too slow ...   It simply was no longer the thing of beauty that it used to be. So ... I said 'so long' and 'thank you', took some cuttings and deposited it in the compost heap to continue its presence in the garden in another form.

Third, the majestic echium shrubs finished flowering by the summer. The shrub was leggy and to my mind looked over-large and unsuited to that position. So I cut it back until it looked OK. It only looked OK when it was nearly invisible.  Some perennial echium are better treated as annuals, although the echiums in the back of my garden manage to look good all the year round.

Then I had an idea. E. wildpretti is biennial and much less dense and bulky than E. candicans. I think it is a similar size to the artichoke that are growing in that area and I thought they might look fabulous together.  So ... after a trip to Heronswood to buy the biennials followed by a bit of garden rearranging, I have finished that bed for the moment and am waiting to see if my idea will work out.

And that is how and why the garden changes.