Saling Hall Flower of the week

Bupleurum fruticosum

'Greenery-yallery, Grosvenor Gallery …….' The line in Patience is about the Aesthetes of the 1870s, but I think of it every year when Bupleurum flowers. It might have been designed to fill a frieze in an Aesthetic home.

B. fruticosum is a light-limbed evergreen shrub from the south of Europe, though I'm not sure I have ever seen it in the wild. In gardens it has a reputation for tenderness, but survived last winter here almost unscathed.

I planted it too close to the front of the border; having grown five feet high and wide it is flopping over the lavender; I shall have to move it. But for a long season, this year from mid-July, its yellow umbels against its blue-green leaves (reputedly like hare's ears) give the garden an irresistible reference to Gilbert and Sullivan.

Back to last week's Flower of the Week