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Miss Willmott's Ghost

She flits around the garden, appearing suddenly in July as a formidably steely lady; a thistle with a viper's bite.

The story goes that the redoubtable Ellen Willmott, a prodigiously extravagant and all-knowing gardener of Edwardian times, scattered the (infallibly fertile) seed of this sharp-edged flower in gardens she approved of. In her own garden, Warley Place in Essex, she is said to have employed 100 staff, and a similar crew at her garden on the Riviera. Her "ghost" is Eryngium giganteum, a short-lived perennial that acts like a biennial, putting down a tap root one year and shooting up its jagged leaves and flowers the next. Beware how you touch them; the steel is as sharp as it looks.

Bees are besotted by them - literally. They lie drunkenly in the spreading silvery bracts.

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