Eryngium horridum (The Nice Eryngium)

An easy to grow herbaceous evergreen ideally suited to your more arid parts. In form it’s got more than a whiff of Mexico about it, being spiky and a little fierce-looking. A typical rosette plant with slender leaves shuttlecocking out from a central growth point in whorls and then arching gracefully into a globular shape that's most handsome and very neat. It actually is from Mexico and has proven itself to be much more reliably evergreen than other Eryngiums.

Panicles of pale jade-like green flowers are produced in summer and once your clump has established you’ll get a lot of these. The mass of bobble-like blooms hovering over the plant is unusual and arresting: each flower head looks like a teeny weeny carving of a pineapple with a spikey court-jester collar.

Great for coastal and exposed gardens where the exposure is to wind and sun. It doesn’t mind these. If however it’s a cold and frosty exposure then pick a sunny corner for it where it can remain sheltered and cosy. Every so often it can be cropped right down in order to get a fresh thrust of all-new foliage in the summer, thus keeping it tidy looking.

Rarely seen for sale and thus not widely grown at all: so a very choice choice for a gravel garden or arid border. Ours came originally, in seed form, from Wakehurst Place in Sussex in 1989. It’s rather mysterious and what little we’ve learned is that it came to Kew Gardens from Mexico and it was likely the only captive one outside of the country at that time. It’s still little known nearly fortyish years on.