Asarum caudatum.

You know those slightly dodgy sci-fi movies & TV series from the 60′s, where our intrepid heroes land on some far-away mysterious planet and find it’s surface rich with bizarre and other-worldly plant forms?

Well, one of my great joys in gardening life is to seek out new, and improbable plant life-forms that can be grown in the garden.

These we affectionately refer to as “Star Trek Plants”.

They’re fun; they’re fascinating; they’re highly collectable: they’re strangely beautiful; best of all they will greatly enrich any garden. Here’s just a few favourites:

Saracenia.

Saracinia flava - red form.

Carnivorous plants are, by their very nature, pretty unusual from the get go, and many defy earth-bound floral conventions by doing away with various things that we’ve come to expect from plants. Like leaves, for example.

Following in that tradition are the Saracenia’s, the hardiest of all Pitcher Plants, and certainly the only ones that can be considered garden hardy in this country. Native to the eastern seaboard of North America, the leaves of these little beauties have vanished, fused instead into a slippery funnel that traps insects and digests their prey in a soup of enzymes.

Great fun (unless you’re a hapless fly, that is) and compellingly beautiful plants that are very much at home in a bog garden too. S. flava and S. purpurea are the ones to look for, along with a huge array of hybrids, each with distinctively patterned pitchers.

Asarum.

Asarum maximum.

If there’s an award for the most fashionable/collectable/in-demand plant in the temperate world then one or other of the 100 odd species of Asarum would have to be a serious contender. The “Wild Gingers” are actually completely unrelated to true gingers but they do exude a warm, gingery fragrance from their foliage.

They are slow-creeping plants of the woodland floor with beautifully patterned, marbled and veined heart-shaped leathery leaves. Beneath their often fabulous leaves they hold an extraordinary floral secret.

Asarum delavayi.

Their flowers vary widely but all defy conventional description. Fleshy, sometimes tubular, sometimes with hugely elongated “tails” and flaring lips in colours such as jet black-and-white, death-grey, lurid purple.

The most flamboyant varieties command huge prices in Japan and the US, but the likes of A. caudatum, A. delayavi and A. maximum are all readily available, and readily grown.

Miracles of nature on any planet, I would never be without them.

Aristolochia.

Aristolochia macrophylla.

Aristolochia, or “Dutchman’s Pipes”, are a large genus of almost exclusively tropical climbing plants with some wonderfully bonkers flowers which can reach epic proportions in the largest species.

Just one species, A. macrophylla, can be regarded as hardy, and, whilst it’s nowhere near the scale of it’s giant cousins, it does share their fabulously bizarre flower shape (the “Dutchman’s Pipe”), coupled with beautiful, large, pale-green leaves that are a perfect heart-shape. The plant is easily grown on a sheltered, sunny wall.

Paris.

Paris polyphylla.

Close relatives to the Trilliums, Paris are another legendary genus of woodland plants, that sadly have nothing to do with the French capital, but are instead, rather prosaically named after the fact that their floral and foliar parts are “paired”.

One cute little species, P. quadrifolia, is a rare British native, but it’s the Asian species that command the most devotion with their extraordinarily sculptural flowers. The petals are reduced to hair-like filaments but the remaining flower parts are hugely enlarged to expose their fascinating arrangements of orange and purple stamens and green or red-brown sepals.

Paris enjoy the same conditions as Trillium and some species follow their floral displays with arrangements of vivid scarlet fruit.

Rheum.

Rheum nobile.

Rheum are rhubarb plants on steroids. Not quite as large as the familiar bog-loving Gunneras, they nevertheless can’t fail to command attention with giant, slightly thorny foliage that is often tinted wine red.

Bold and handsome though it is the foliage in itself isn’t enough to qualify the plants for Outer Space recognition though. It’s actually the flowers, and more particularly the vast, bract-enclosed 2-metre tall floral structures of the near-mythical Nepalese species R. nobile that catapult it to the top of this list.

These yellow towers are actually protection for the true flowers that sit, completely enclosed, within. The effort of producing the flowering stems is such that the plants die after flowering, but the huge quantities of seed held in the other-worldly  flower statues ensures continuation of the species.

Dracunculus.

Dracunculus vulgaris.

Dracunculus – literally “Dragon plant” – is one of the many highly dramatic members of the Aroid (Arum Lily) family. This is one of the largest and strangest of all of the worlds plant families, and, with the mighty 3 metre tall and 2 metre wide Amorphophallus titanium,  includes the largest single flowering structure of any plant on earth.

Dracunculus vulgaris is nowhere near that size, but it does bring much of it’s giant cousins bizarre charm to the garden. Basically it’s very large, velvet textured, blood red and black flower, which has evolved to resemble a rotting corpse, with a smell to match – although only for a few days, luckily!

The species is native to the Balkans and enjoys the warmest spot you can find in the garden, where it will produce magnificent, heavily divided foliage and, just occasionally, one or two of those fantastical 90cm tall flowers.

Echium.

Echium pininana.

Echiums are another large-ish family of flowering plants, but it’s E. pininana, the so-called “Tree Echium” that makes the grade here. These plants are endemic to La Palma in the Canary Islands, but have also proved remarkably adaptable to British gardens, albeit in the most sheltered and warm positions.

E. pininana is a biennial. The plants produce a not-very-inspiring clump of low foliage in their first year of growth, but, if all has gone well and sufficient stores of energy have been built up, then year two will see an extraordinary tower emerge.

Densely packed with narrow foliage and many thousands of small blue flowers this soon becomes a giant flowering spike that can eventually reach 4 metres in height before setting seed and dying away altogether.

Cardiocrinum.

Cardiocrinum giganteum.

Not to be outdone in the giant stakes, Cardiocrinum giganteum is, essentially, a trumpet lily. But, as their name suggests, these are trumpet lilies that are keen to take the starring role in Jack-and-the-beanstalk, defying gravity to produce colossal, nearly 5-metre-tall flowering stems that are capable of putting even the loftiest Echium to shame.

It’s not just sheer size that Cardiocrinums have to offer though, their huge, pendulous white trumpets are also intoxicatingly fragrant and spectacularly beautiful, stained, as they are, with burgundy. Even the foliage is magnificent – each leaf up to 60cm across and highly glossy.

Like several of these plants, individual Cardiocrinum plants die after flowering (which can take 5 or more years from a young plant), but being bulbous they also produce a multitude of offset bulbs that can be grown on to form the next generation of giants.

They are really very hardy, but consideration should obviously be given to the size of the flowers and foliage and the most wind-sheltered spot selected, preferably with the protection of nearby trees. The more food and water the plants have access to then the bigger the flower spike that they can produce. What are you waiting for??