Gardening blogGardens This article is more than 14 years oldThe joy of the melancholy thistle
This article is more than 14 years oldGarden writer Caroline Beck on the delights of a native northernerMy melancholy thistle, Cirsium heterophyllum, has been blooming now for six weeks and is only just coming to a damp and suitably sad end. In fair weather and foul it has been covered in bees who reel in drunken ecstasy when they land on its soft flowers, plunging themselves recklessly into the purple heads and leaving exhausted minutes later.
One day I watched a red admiral butterfly for 10 minutes methodically going over one single bloom, like a geek with a metal detector. They grow wild in the northern uplands, a plant of high summer looking anything but melancholy as they tower en masse above the felted strappy leaves. You see them around my home in the Durham dales, their purple heads looking glamourously sassy against the lichened drystone walls.
It's only when you see them on dull days – which we're not short of here – that you realise why they're known as melancholy.The colour is of a bruise, or a sullen sky promising rain. I'd never thought of bringing them into the garden until I saw them planted in striking drifts at Herterton House, a gem of a garden, in Northumberland. The owners, Frank and Marjorie Lawley, have a genius for taming wild flowers and allying them with more cultivated neighbours without losing the drama of the native plant. They constrain them within tight box edging and plant shirley poppies at their feet. The purple heads glow even more fiercely against the dark green box and on the day I saw them they were covered in sleepy butterflies.
So be not sad! Plant the melancholy thistle, a plant that looks great for weeks, holds its own in any company and brings joy to your garden as well as local butterflies and bees.
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