Back to latest Flower of the Week

Japanese anemone – Anemone x hybrida

From July to October this is my first choice, year after year.

30 years ago we made a stained glass window for the conservatory with our favourite flowers of the four seasons. They were the Corsican hellebore, Crown Imperial, agapanthus, and Japanese anemone (and lots of vine leaves). I might change the Crown Imperial for another spring flower, but the anemone’s place is indisputable.

For grace, dependability, long service and its million moods in all lights, positions, circumstances, winds and weathers there is nothing to match it, whether in its white form, ‘Honorine Jobert’, so tall and pure above its vine-or-maple leaves, or in the pink form brought home from my parents’ old garden on the Kentish North Downs, where it flourished in long grass on hard chalk. I rarely take out my camera without photographing it at yet another angle in another light.

It is a wandering plant, termed ‘invasive’ when it heads in the wrong direction, but I am ready to welcome it anywhere.

See next page for last week's Flower of the Week