Beauty in decay
My desk looks out over the front garden and I have just been distracted by three goldfinches feasting on the rudbeckia seed heads. It prompted me to go outside and cut some before the plants start to disintegrate (still leaving plenty for the birds of course) and to see what other seed heads were still standing. I’d been feeling slightly depressed about the garden. From a distance the borders look how I feel at the moment – a bit flat and no sparkle – and I’ve been ignoring all the tidying up I should be doing. But isolating the plants with the seed heads and cutting some of each made me look at the plants anew.
There really is such incredible beauty in this natural decay. Piet Oudolf has famously written and spoken about this, and chooses plants as much for their winter skeletons as their summer flowers. ‘Many gardeners see the dead and dying stems of perennials at the end of the year as rubbish to clear away,’ he says, ‘but plants can be as beautiful in death as they are in life.’ It is this intense appreciation of perennials throughout their lifecycle that is at the heart of Piet’s garden ethos.
The most beautiful seed head I picked today was one that I hadn’t really given much attention to in the garden. With pods in a rich, chestnut brown, the seed heads of Gladiolus papilio ‘Ruby’ are like works of art. In the garden, the plant was half collapsed, sprawled untidily over the path, but as soon as I cut it and put it on the table to photograph it, it took on another life. The humble Verbascum chaixii ‘Album’, which is threatening to take over my garden by self seeding a little too enthusiastically, also takes on a new character as it dies. The tall flower spike produces hundreds of rounded oval pods clustering together in subtle shades of tawny brown, creating a textured, sculptural form. (No wonder there are so many seedlings everywhere as each one of the hundreds of pods contains masses of tiny seeds). Despite my half empty impression of a garden drained of colour, when you look closely these seed heads come in so many shades and hues, from the honey-blond hydrangea to the dark chocolate whorls of phlomis, from nearly-black sedums to silver honesty. The monarda seed heads are like little hedgehogs, while the eupatorium looks like a galaxy of tiny white stars on a network of delicate stems. All you have to do is take time to look closely, and a whole new and wonderful world is opened up to you.
