As a botanist who grew up in tropical Singapore I have always been in love with exotic garden style, but not in the way you might expect. As a kid I was obsessed with creating an English country garden in sweltering rainforest conditions, begging my grandmother in Wales to mail me packets of sweetpea and nasturtium seeds so I could sow them in trays by air-conditioning vents and in chiller cabinets. To me these were impossibly exotic, otherworldly plants I only knew from storybooks.
Flash forward 30 years, however, and in the tiny Croydon patch I now have to play with I am forever experimenting with ornamental plants with massive jungly leaves and carnival-like flowers. You see, to me gardening is all about escapism, and playing with nature to create your very own fantasy world accessible from your front door.
Sadly, in the UK, tropical-effect gardening has become synonymous with huge expense and tricky to care for, often painfully slow-growing plants. Yet if you get your species choice right, you don’t have to splash out a small fortune on towering palms or tree ferns to get a flavour of faraway places. To prove it here are some of my favourite plants that provide massive impact in a single season from a modestly priced packet of seed or bulbs.
Eucalyptus are some of the fastest-growing trees on earth and can reach 6ft in a single season from a packet of seed. I love the frost-hardy cider gum (Eucalyptus gunnii) for its bright silver foliage, that can be kept at a manageable size by being cut right back to the base each spring, from where it produces its flushes of disc-shaped, powdery foliage.
For truly massive leaves, the foxglove tree (Paulownia tomentosa) can also be sown from seed and is extremely fast-growing. If whacked to the base each spring, it can throw out leaves the size of dustbin lids on branches 9ft high by the autumn. Other super quick, great impact foliage plants from seed include ricinus, echiums and solenostemon.
If it’s flowers you’re after, cannas, tree lilies and hedychiums will all put on a spectacular show year after year from an inexpensive packet of rhizomes – and from their very first summer, too. But to me the most quirky and cool of all the summer bulbs is the pineapple lily (Eucomis sp), a super easy to grow plant that in my experience can take all the cold and neglect you can give it. Eucomis bicolor has spectacular-sized cream and apple green flowers with a delicate purple lining, while Eucomis comosa ‘Sparkling Burgundy’, as the name suggests, kicks the shocking purple pigment into overdrive.
With plants like these, anyone can have a storybook jungle in their back yard for less than the price of a meal out.
