Life

The Casual Gardener: Honesty is the best policy

Self-seeding Honesty lights up the spring garden with purple flowers before its distinctive coin-like pods add an architectural edge. John Manley finds that it's best left to its own devices

John Manley

John Manley

A relative late comer to journalism, John has been with The Irish News for close to 25 years and has been the paper’s Political Correspondent since 2012.

Honesty – Lunaria annua – is welcome to both gardeners and bees
Honesty – Lunaria annua – is welcome to both gardeners and bees Honesty – Lunaria annua – is welcome to both gardeners and bees

THE idea behind ornamental gardening is to create an idealised version of nature. For many years the received wisdom was to suppress the garden’s natural aspect by imposing human formality and order, an approach manifested in many of the classic French and Italian gardens whose influence is still pervasive in some quarters. But to make your garden so pre-determined in its form and planting is to lose the element of surprise. It relegates nature to the status of a garden tool rather than a partner. If you are really embracing nature rather than eschewing it, you need to be prepared to tolerate its fickleness – and more often than not you’ll be rewarded.

Nothing represents this mildly anarchic approach better than the self-seeders - that group of annuals and biennials that play by nature’s rules rather than yours. Fox gloves, teasel, evening primrose, great mullein, aquilegia – their unplanned presence can bring joy while elsewhere greater expectations from other, exponentially more expensive plants aren’t realised.

This year I’ve been close to overwhelmed by another self-seeder and one that took me very much by surprise. Honesty – Lunaria annua – differs from most of the above list in that it peaks much earlier in the year. However, with seed heads so showy, Honesty’s appeal is prolonged well past its flowering period of late April, May and early June. I introduced it into my garden five or six years ago, scattering the plentiful seeds on the leeward

side of my shelter belt. The following year it appeared in abundance, its pink-purple flowers providing the perfect foil to the white daffodils, and bringing colour to what was an otherwise shady, unremarkable spot. In subsequent years, however, it was much less visible, turning up only occasionally and in isolation – until this year, that is. As if from nowhere a new wave of honesty appeared in the place where it had first been sown.

What prompted its resurgence I can only guess – perhaps some weeding last year disturbed the seeds of this biennial (and occasional annual) or its progress has been helped by increased light due to the hard pruning of the shelter belt? Whatever the reason it’s very welcome and I reckon the bees that’ll pollinate my fruit trees over the coming weeks agree with this sentiment.

A native of the Balkans, honesty escaped from Irish gardens some time ago and became naturalised. It crops up in hedgerows and on (uncut and unsprayed) verges but is never invasive. According to the distribution map in Zöe Devlin’s indispensable ‘Wildflowers of Ireland’, it is sparse throughout much of the country but is found in large numbers in the south-east and in two bands stretching 20-odd miles both east and west from Lough Neagh. Honesty also comes in a white variety, Lunaria annua var. alba – AKA white-flowered honesty – which is pretty much exactly the same, only in white.

What arguably gains both the white and mauve honesty most attention is the aforementioned seed heads, which are flat, translucent and the size of 10 pence piece. It’s because of these disc type pods, which are much sought after by flower arrangers, that the plant gets variously referred to as ‘silver dollars’, ‘pope’s coin’ ‘moonwort’ and ‘money plant’. The round shape also accounts for the ‘Lunar-ia’ in its species name.

I only know how to propagate it in situ, though that has been a success only two years out of six. It can be sown under controlled conditions but be mindful that as a brassica, it develops a deep tap root that makes it difficult to transplant once it reaches a certain stage. Honesty prefers limey, alkaline conditions and needs no feeding.