he Deanery garden is reaching peak abundance. Amid the hazy froth of plants, I appreciate the ‘vertical accents’ as designers like to call spike-shaped blooms. They serve to punctuate the borders and break up the mounds. By giving the eye somewhere to rest, they slow down our visual assessment of a garden and thereby increase our pleasure in it. Hollyhocks and acanthus are classic examples of this. I grow ‘Marietta’, which is smaller in scale with densely packed purple spires, and f. – a biennial that self-seeds. My plant of the moment is ‘Lilac Squirrel’, not quite a ‘vertical’, since the flowering ‘tails’ that inspired the wonderful cultivar name are somewhat droopy. It is definitely an accent plant though by virtue of its flowers’ cerise-pink hue.
