Magic Wands
Look at any planting scheme designed by a top garden designer these days, and you’ll almost certainly find a persicaria somewhere in the mix. Loved by the likes of Tom Stuart-Smith and Piet Oudolf for their natural charm, textural foliage and ability to deliver flowers over an impressively long period, for the rest of us persicaria offer a simple answer to the age-old question of how to prolong the garden’s colour and interest as the season wears on.
It’s only relatively recently that these kinds of persicaria have become so popular. Go back a decade or so and the persicaria you were more likely to find were those grown for their colourful foliage: cultivars like ‘Painter’s Palette’, for example, with its cream-, green- and red-splashed leaves, – the ones with slender flower spikes in shades of pink, coral and red.
