Tag Archive for: cordylines

How to quickly transform your garden

Without these Festival™ Raspberry cordylines (known as Raspberry Fountain™ in the southern hemisphere), you’d have a very ho hum landscape of clipped hedge, standard roses and bluebells. Adding strappy plants is a fast make-over.

How to quickly transform your garden… just add some strappy plants. It’s the simplest way to take dull, outdated plantings and lift them into being described as edgy and lovely. It doesn’t really matter which strappy plants you decide to add to your existing garden, but picking something easy-to-grow and good-looking makes a lot of sense. Here are two of the best – one tall and broad-leafed and the other shorter and finer foliaged. Both are easy to find and will do a terrific job with no effort from you, apart from planting them.

1. Burgundy Spire™ is a cordyline, and like any cordyline, Burgundy Spire has strappy leaves. These are special, thanks not only to being a gorgeous deep burgundy but they are broad and blade-like, and unlike many other cordylines, the foliage covers the truck right down to the ground. Even more impressive is the plant’s height – ten to twelve feet tall and around three feet wide. There are also purple flowers in spring, produced on branchlets 20 inches long. This is a plant to stand out and be noticed and these are the ways to use it best. It’s tall so plant it towards the back of the garden bed. Where structure is needed, set a regimented row to stand behind a loose planting in the foreground. If you want to make something of the entry into your garden, plant cordyline Burgundy Spire on either side of the path to act as sentries. Or if you have a long garden bed filled over time with plants added with no plan, add a couple of clusters of three along its length to give the landscape some intent. To grow cordyline Burgundy Spire, it is best to dig a hole for it somewhere there is full sun, and water it in. Keep it watered for a few weeks then relax.

Standing tall and glorious, with skirts to their ankles, these Burgundy Spire™ cordylines in a trial garden clearly outshine another variety (far right). Up close (below) the foliage is broad-bladed with a lustre.
Add strappy plants

2. Festival™ cordylines are just as special and stand-out good looking as cordyline Burgundy Spire, but for different reasons. They are smaller – they grow to a little over three feet tall and wide – which means they have different super-powers. They don’t grow a trunk but instead look a lot like a clump of grass. Their foliage is narrow and more cascading (hence the name Fountain™ cordylines, as used in the southern hemisphere) and they too have branchlets, of soft pink, softly scented flowers. But their real stand out is their foliage colour options: Cordyline Festival Burgundy is a deep glossy burgundy; Cordyline Festival Raspberry is a striped combo of burgundy and raspberry pink; and Cordyline Festival Lime is a bright lime green. Armed with these options it’s easy to give a very ordinary garden a massive lift. Tuck a few clusters of three into any existing planting and the whole garden bed will suddenly look intentional. Plant a row along one side of the garden path and the rest of the garden will pick up some design intent by default. Or plant them into containers set out onto the patio and the garden will act as the backdrop and your potted lovelies will take all the attention. Which color to use is up to you: take your cue from the existing plantings or ignore the garden and plant what you like the look of best. To grow a Festival cordyline, dig a hole for it anywhere there is full sun to part shade. Set it low in the hole and water it in. Keep it watered for a few weeks then relax.

Cordyline Festival™ Burgundy (also known as Red Fountain™ in the southern hemisphere) in flower is surprisingly lovely (above); Festival™ Raspberry is gloriously, deliciously colourful (below).
Add strappy plants
Strappy plants

3 reasons to use Strappy plants

3 reasons to use strappy plants
Just one strappy plant has restored some style to this unstructured garden planting: it needs to be lovely though and this is the Festival™ Burgundy (Red Fountain™) cordyline.

Here’s something you might not know about strappy plants – they’re a brilliant fix when you find yourself faced with a gardening disaster. Take these 3 reasons to use strappy plants. We’ve all been here: this is how strappy foliage can dig us out of the hole (pun intended)…

1. Inserting some style: at some point the most rigid landscape design loses its edge. Plants grow. Or they self seed from somewhere else. Or we find ourselves with new plants – gifts or brought home from the garden centre on a whim – and we tuck them in amongst the rest. Some gardeners are happy with this d-evolution but for too many of us, we wander out one day and it suddenly hits us that our landscape has shifted. It’s become blurry. It may be charming but it has lost its punchiness and style. The fix is simple. Find a strappy plant that you like the look of, something you know will perform without fuss like a Festival™ cordyline (known as Fountain™ cordyline in the southern hemisphere). Position a few where you think they’re needed (they’ll add texture and focus), then plant them into the garden. Problem solved.

3 reasons to use strappy plants
Picture this blue glazed pot with only the osteospermum daisies. A bit ho hum. But add in a Festival™ Cordyline – and it’s a very different vibe.

2. The tragic granny-look mixed planter: if you are a container gardener – a keen collector of pots filled with lovely plants – it’s tricky maintaining a stylish or even funky vibe. There are a few tricks you can use, like growing whatever you like but in matching containers… all classic terracotta, or glazed blue, or modernist concrete. (The flipside version of this looks awesome too, but it is a bit boring for hands-on gardeners: an eclectic collection of pots but with the same plant growing in all of them.) The most common problem is the big container filled with a mix of plants which is starting to look like you’re minding it for your Great Aunt Bernice while she’s in hospital. The fix is easy. Pop in a strappy foliaged plant and your mixed container’s edginess will be restored. Problem solved.

3. The ugly view: surely every gardener faces this problem at some point? We are charged with blocking the view of the neighbor’s ugly garage, or too-public hot-pool. And to make things more difficult, we often don’t have much room to work with – literally. So the next time you’re faced with a very narrow planting footprint and you need something to leap out of the ground and provide cover fast, embrace something like the strappy tower Burgundy Spire™ Cordyline. Not only will your functional problem be solved, but you’ll have done it with a flourish of design flair.

3 reasons to use strappy plants
Cordyline Burgundy Spire™ is a great strappy solution for when an ugly view needs to be covered by something lovely and stylish.