Dance With Wallflowers

What's not to love about these pretty long-bloomers?

ALTHOUGH I'D pretty much sworn off perennials, I'm smitten by wallflowers. They're one of those very few plants that simplify rather than complicate your gardening life. Just plant a slew of them, and your garden's got a color scheme for most of the year. Plus they don't spread, grow too large or need deadheading. Wallflowers grow quickly, smell delicious, bloom nonstop and come in so many pretty colors.

Familiar spring bloomers like primroses and lungwort (Pulmonaria) offer only tattered leaves by the time it warms up enough to spend time outdoors. Other spring temptations like bleeding heart and ranunculus die away by summer, leaving gaps in the garden. But wallflower foliage stays neat and slug-free year-round, flowering from summer through autumn. Wallflowers are ideal minglers. Just be sure to plant a bunch of them because their impact comes not from a single flower like a rose but from a mass of color.

What I like best about all the new cultivars is that the flowers are bicolored, and sometimes even tricolored, giving the multidimensional effect much like an expensive highlighting you'd get for your hair. In the case of wallflowers, nature (or the hybridizer) is an inspired stylist. And, the little clusters of buds are deeper in color than the flowers, creating a shadow against the brighter and paler shades of the petals.

Of course, such perfection harbors a dark secret, and the wallflower's flaw is that it is short-lived. All that blooming wears them out; they literally bloom themselves to death after a few years. But measure their contribution by seasons, rather than years, a calculation that holds up pretty well to other perennials. Besides, you'll be ready to play around with your garden's color schemes in a few years anyway, won't you?

Botanically, wallflowers are Erysimum that hail from the cliffs of southeastern Europe, which means they need sunshine and good drainage. Long a staple of English cottage gardens, wallflowers enjoy mild winters and cool, moist springs and summers, conditions that sound all too familiar to coastal gardeners. They flower best when it isn't too hot, which is most of the time around here. For continuous summer bloom, water wallflowers during droughty spells. If they look at all tatty by July, give them a haircut and they'll bounce back with months more bloom.

In springtime, pair wallflowers with daffodils and tulips because they do the job of hiding the bulbs' withering foliage as it dies down. In summer, wallflowers fluff out the base of shrubs or add a frothy layer of color around larger perennials and annuals. They're perfect for lining a walkway or weaving in colorful ribbons through borders. Both in height and airy texture, wallflowers pair well with the smaller ornamental grasses. Orange or yellow wallflowers look so good planted with bronze New Zealand sedge (Carex testacea) in containers or in the ground for an inspired, year-round combo.

Wallflowers are the ticket for easy-care container plants, too. They flower so long you won't need to replant through the year. Pot them in March, and you're set through autumn. Vivid E. 'Apricot Twist' looks great in a cobalt blue or green pot for a real hit of color. E. 'Bowles Mauve,' with a silvery-gray sheen to its foliage and mauve flowers, looks sophisticated planted in a pewter-toned or black pot. And E. 'Wenlock Beauty' is a color scheme all to itself in shades of buff, mauve, orange and red that pick up the warm tones of a terra-cotta container.

And why are these sweetly scented, pretty little cottage garden wonders called "wallflowers"? They earned their name through a long history of growing happily in the dryish, alkaline soil at the base of old mortared walls, or even in the crevices of decaying cement, where conditions are dry and well-drained. Their name offers a good clue about how to make a success of these hard-working plants.

Valerie Easton is a Seattle freelance writer and contributing editor for Horticulture magazine. Her e-mail address is valeaston@comcast.net. Jacqueline Koch is a writer and photographer living in Seattle.