Seaside plants and gardening

Magnificent tree mallow flowers

Although the tree mallow (Malva or Lavatera arborea) is quite a scruffy plant, its flower are stunning.

They’re easily as beautiful as the flowers of more exotic hibiscuses, to which they are related.

Not only are the flowers beautiful, and loved by bees, but the tree mallow also presents them very carefully. The tightly wrapped, pointed buds open into the flower for just a few hours.

Mallow flowerbud – tightly wrapped and pointed

The tree mallow then re-wraps the petals into a tidy little tube, before dropping them on the ground.

A finished mallow flower that is being rolled back up again (no point at the tip and the sepals pushed back)

And this picture shows all stages – unopened bud, fully open flower, re-furling flower, and the more bluey coloured petal tubes are just about to drop.

Several of the tree mallows in my garden died this winter – the temperature was never very low, but there were enough cold nights to wear the mallows out. For me, if the temperature is lower than +3C (i.e. not even an official frost) for more than a few nights in close succession, the larger plants will give up. First they droop their leaves, as though to protect the buds; but if conditions don’t improve, they die.

Nevertheless, there are always lots of up-and-coming youngsters ready to take over. And they grow from a couple of inches to full tree size, covered with flowers, in just a few weeks.

Incidentally, rabbits love mallow leaves and they’re said to be soothing for their digestion. They’re also edible for humans, but I’ve never tried them. Even the seeds are edible too.

Olearia nummularifolia

Olearia nummularifolia is an interesting, fragrant and easy to grow ever green shrub.

It has tiny, thick, leathery oval leaves and a much branched stem with a generally upright habit. During July and August the tips of its stems are covered with intensely fragrant (if a little scruffy looking) white flowers.

It is hardy in the UK and tolerant of salty winds, making it an ideal low maintenance shrub for seaside gardens. It needs no pruning and is not at all unruly.

It propagates easily from cuttings – most easily if you keep the growing medium a little on the dry side – but it is slow growing, so you need to be prepared to wait for a shrub of substance to grow! It will never be super-sized anyway, generally only growing to 2m in height at most.

Erigeron glaucus – Eric and Ron

Eric and Ron, or Erigeron glaucus if you prefer, is one of my favourite low-growing, summer flowering seaside plants. It is also known as sea fleabane and beach aster. It thrives in poor, light seaside soils and quickly spreads to form a mound of slightly greyish (hence glaucus) leaves, each plant easily spreading to cover a two foot square.

In this area, they usually flower from late May through to August. The flowers are lovely. They are typical daisy-like composites with pale purpley-pink-mauve rays around the outside and a golden coloured centre (the disc). The flowers are 2cm to 3cm across and there are masses of them, making an attractive display.

Eric and Ron isn’t completely hardy, although several sites say it is. I lost one bunch of mine completely in the hard winter a couple of years ago and frequently they will be damaged by frost, but not sufficiently much to kill them. The plants’ natural habitat is in coastal California and Oregon.

Last week, I was working in a coastal garden and cutting back clumps of Eric and Ron that had grown long and straggly and suffered from a little bit of frost damage. They respond well to cutting back, especially at this time of the year, just as they are beginning to grow again. An added benefit is that they smell delicious as they’re cut; something a little bit like fresh fruits and amber mixed together.

Whilst chopping them back, I also took cuttings: some stem and some tip, to see how they do.

In brief Erigeron glaucus is: