Observer Life

by Monty Don

I recently wrote in this column about the 'Water Wise' garden at Hampton Court, singling it out as the only truly modern garden in the show. Not only was it very modern, but it was also very spiky. There were spikes all over the place ... the planting was as aggressively sharp and pointed as the hard landscaping (this symbiosis was one of the great virtues of the garden), so the spaces between wood and plants were caught on the points of the yuccas, grasses and thistles.

This opened my eyes. Not because of the pointedly up-yours thrust of the garden - though I am instinctively on the side of anyone shocking the horticultural bourgeoisie - but because it showed that spiky plants could be beautiful....

When the term 'architectural plants' first became part of fashionable horticultural jargon, the regiment of spiny plants were right in the van. I remember going down to Sussex nearly nine years ago and filming for a television show at a nursery called Architectural Plants, then new but now well established, and doing an item in mid-winter about a south-facing bank entirely planted with yuccas, the archetypal architectural plant. Angus White, the nursery owner, was marvellously enthusiastic about them - and still is ...I remember White telling me he had made up the bank with hardcore, reproducing some of the yucca's original desert conditions, to create the drainage and poor soil quality most of them love. Like all desert plants, yuccas withstand severe cold but hate sitting in wet ground - the combination of wet and cold is lethal.

The first advantage of yuccas is that they are evergreen, so their structure remains constant year round. The second is, I suppose the whiff of the exotic that surrounds them.. .the third is the sheer strength of outline, the celebrated 'architectural' quality of the plant. The fourth is the extra spillage of glaucous leaves. It is overwhelmingly impressive...

If you have a small garden, Y filamentosa is a stemless species that has curly threads spiraling off the edges of the leaves in a rather carefree fashion, like a fiercely armed guardsman with ribbons in his hair and beard. So does Y glauca, which has very narrow leaves. White recommends planting it in drifts for a massed effect which goes back to the matter of planting with conviction... Architectural Plants has a wide selection of spikes (and other things) at its two nurseries ... the entertaining and idiosyncratic catalogue is geared towards the average gardener rather than the specialist plant -hunter.