Miss Willmott's Ghosts: the extraordinary life and gardens of a forgotten genius

Product Information

willmottiae, discovered by planthunter Ernest Henry ‘Chinese’ Wilson on his first trip to Szechuan in 1899 – a trip she helped finance. The plant has a commanding presence, and while it dies after flowering, a generous crop of seeds ensures subsequent generations. This year there are no indications of emerging flower spikes, so I am hopeful they’ll bloom next year. Miss Willmott and Gertrude Jekyll were the only two women amongst 58 men to be awarded the RHS Victoria Medal of Honour (VMH) in 1897, the year of its institution to mark Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee. In her lifetime, however, Ellen was known equally – and in some circles more – for her musical abilities.

I read this as her gardens weee on my home town and I was curious as to how this respected horticulturalist and gardener had been forgotten. The plant in question is Eryngium giganteum, the giant sea holly, usually known as Miss Willmott’s Ghost , a short-lived herbaceous perennial thistle, native to the Caucasus region and surrounding areas. There’s nectar in their steely grey tops though the lower flowerheads are browning and going to seed. giganteum)" with its large flower-heads: “ greatly appreciated for winter decorations, and although not highly coloured like many of the others, they make pretty bouquets arranged with Grasses, etc.As Willmott admirers went, there were few more ardent than her mentor, Swiss alpinist Henry Correvon.

Cutting back will not harm your plants but will help in their establishment by promoting new root and shoot growth once planted. Enter your tracking number and postcode there and you will be able to track the progess of your parcel(s). Ellen Ann Willmott was a remarkable woman whose achievements in horticulture, botany, landscape architecture, photography and more, should have made her one of the most well-known trailblazers of her age. Miss Willmott, so the story goes, liked to sprinkle seeds of a giant sea holly when visiting gardens.

I listened to the audiobook and found the narrator a bit off putting, but enjoyed Ellen’s life story, and the puzzle of how it was put together. Today, therefore, I’m going to focus on one of the best tools Willmott obsessives have in their box: The Kip. Eryngium giganteum is not included for some reason, although as the smaller sea holly, Eryngium maritimum is, I've included it. But like the velvet shadows that hid away during the sunny months, ghosts are out there biding their time. The pollination seed collection brings together a range of plants and flowers that are not only beautiful, but will also help attract a wide variety of pollinators to your garden and help enhance the ecosystem.

Avoid the temptation to cut back the flower-heads in autumn as they provide interest in the winter garden. Bees, butterflies and beneficial pollinating insects love it too, while deer and rabbit tend to dislike it. One of the things that home gardeners can do to help is to cultivate native plants that provide nectar and food for pollinators, such as those you will find in the pollination collection. The lack of cash meant that her car was gone, so she took the cheapest train up to London for RHS meetings, with a long walk home from the station at night (possibly explains the gun in the handbag).

Yet, both posthumously and within her lifetime, she instead became known as a bitter, cantankerous and eccentric miser, and her reputation has been forever stained by the image of her maliciously seeding other people's gardens with thorns. As a lover of gardening and gardens I was intrigued by this book as I knew nothing of Ellen Willmott, who gardened near me at Warley Place in Brentwood, Essex. These days, I stick to collecting seeds of benevolent annuals and biennials — continuity and obsolescence are built into their nature. With its luminous spiny collar of silvery-white bracts surrounding an egg-shaped flower head and tightly packed with flowers, initially pale green, then changing to steel-blue, Miss Willmott’s Ghost (Eryngium giganteum) is quite a catch and an asset to any garden!

Special Exhibition Label: 'Eccentricity: Unexpected Objects and Irregular Behaviour' (10/5/2011 - 16/10/2011) (MHS Narratives: IRN 15071)".

Examine regularly whilst in fridge and immediately remove any seeds which show signs of germination. An absolute classic cottage garden biennial with a brilliant architectural presence and will self-sow. In some places, I felt like the author channeled her socialite subject and was just name dropping, making some scenes feel quite random and not tied to the story or we get what feels like the author's starting off a real corker of a side story to just leave us hanging without any more details. Both the species and its cultivar, Silver Ghost , have gained the Royal Horticultural Society’s Award of Garden Merit.