WALL INTEREST

When the garden is dormant you can always find plants of interest to look at on walls. There are some lovely south facing walls around where I live and they are awash with life. You will find that there is still a lot of growth on the warmer walls. Mosses are especially prevalent in January. These hardy plants can tolerate the wettest winters and the driest summers and need no attention from us whatsoever to give an attractive show. Mosses don’t set seed like normal plants; they produce tint spores in summer. You can see the beginnings of the spore pod capsules on stalks. These will later produce the dust like spores that get up peoples noses and cause hay fever in summer. Other walls have tiny ferns. They might look like the larger types but some are naturally tiny and have adapted brilliantly to their environment. Look for Wall Rue. With fronds divided like parsley, and Bladder Fern, these have tiny blebs on the backs of the leaves. Two kinds have slender fronds with a row of simple lobes on each side. One, Maidenhair Spleenwort, has fine black stalks. The other, Rusty -Back is so called because of the mass of brown scales on the underside of the fronds. This type curl up and look quite dead in dry weather.

Besides these you may find tiny flowering plants, which are seldom found anywhere else. The Ivy-leaved Toadflax makes bushy clusters of hanging stems with pretty mauve flowers like snapdragons. This plant sow it’s own seed on the wall. The stalks bend backwards and push the seed capsule into a crack. Wall Pepper or Yellow Stonecrop is a fleshy plant with a “Hot” taste, which stores water in its leaves.

Horticultural.