Graham Porter’s gardening: Japanese anemones, plant of the week

Sep 4 2010 by Our Correspondent, Huddersfield Daily Examiner

Late summer flowering Japanese anemones are stunning members of the buttercup family.

They must be the easiest herbaceous plants to care for, requiring no staking, no dead heading and only cutting back once a year in late autumn.

Other than that minimal amount of effort, you get luxuriant foliage from spring until autumn and scores of branched flowering stems giving a floral display from late July until early October – that has to be good value for money.

The commonly available species include A. hupehensis that has a range of hybrids with white or pink flowers up to 90cm (3’) tall.

Look out for Bressingham Glow and Hadspen Abundance. A. x hybrida can get a little taller to 1.5 metres (5’) but is still well behaved and includes hybrids such as Elegans, Lady Gilmour, Prince Henry and Queen Charlotte, with flower colours again varying from pure white to the deepest pink.

This group of anemones, unlike their spring flowering woodland garden relatives, require full sun to perform to their best and a fertile, moisture retentive but well-drained soil.

They can be propagated by division in March and may need some of their wandering rhizome removing every few years to prevent them from taking over areas of the garden.