Jacqueline Houston is a member of the Wedgwood Garden Club, and also a Master Gardener of King County. She has been gardening in Seattle for over 30 years, and now has a garden consulting/coaching business called Enchanted Garden Consulting. Wedgwood Garden Club always welcomes new members – contact Jacqueline at tppoems@comcast.net for more information on our monthly meetings.
Photo credit: Eden Brothers
In Britain, English wallflowers are an absolute staple of the spring garden, filling the air with fragrance. So I was baffled when I moved to the US to find that the wallflowers here were different.
Erysimum ‘Bowles Mauve’ is probably the most common one here in nurseries, and while there is some fragrance if you stick your nose in it, it is nothing like the ones in Britain. I was once waiting to cross the road to enter Holland Park in London, and I could already smell the wallflowers, bedded out with forget-me-nots in huge beds, pouring forth their fragrance on the air.
‘Bowles Mauve’ is a very nice plant, if you like mauve (I don’t), and flowers for months on end, so great value for money. The English wallflowers (Cheiranthus Cheiri) are Spring flowerers, in Britain bought cheaply and treated like annuals (they’re actually bi-annuals, meaning they just have leaves the first year, flowering in the second year), then frequently discarded. They are simply unobtainable in nurseries around here, and so I tracked down seeds and grew my own (very easy), and have been saving seeds and replanting ever since.
You can currently find these seeds at online companies such as Eden Brothers and Everwilde Farms. They come in mixed shades of yellow, orange, and burgundy, and while they are officially bi-annual, I regard them as short-lived perennials, pruning them after flowering down to the lowest green shoots – sort of like lavender – and I get several years of flowering out of them before they get woody and old and I replace them. They don’t mind poor soil – they actually grow wild on the sandy cliffs above Port Townsend, and yet the nearby nurseries still don’t stock them.
I wouldn’t be without their rich perfume on a warm spring day, and I still can’t understand why they’re not available here.