Start the Summer with a …‘SPLASH’ of colour

The month of May should see glorious sunshine beaming down on Italian gardens. However, this year nature is trying to catch up on this winter’s low rainfall by granting Italian gardens with heavy downpours and grey skies. In order to ensure that the sunshine still shines in the Italian garden, one can use the colour yellow to brighten up even the dullest of days!

Plants like Spanish broom (Spartium junceum), Forsythia (Forsythia x intermedia), Iris pseudocorus and even a native Californian plant, like Fremontodendron californica flower at the beginning of summer and will provide the Italian garden with a huge ‘splash’ of sunshine, even when there is none! All colours have an effect on our moods and yellow, being the colour of sunshine, is just about the most vibrant and positive on the garden designer’s colour palette. Spring is generally drenched in this colour, as spring-flowering bulbs like daffodils open to remind us that the winter will soon be behind us and the summer is not far away. All over the Mediterranean, hillsides suddenly burst into the brightest of yellows, as the Spanish broom plant blooms, towards the middle of May. Spanish broom is a tough, undemanding Mediterranean plant that is totally adapted to south-facing, dry and arid Mediterranean hillsides. It’s a sun-lover and requires as much sunshine as it can get and suffers horribly in the shade, producing spindly stems and very few flowers. However, when it receives the sun it needs it seems to do it’s very best to give some of that sunshine back to the Italian gardener, in the form of the brightest yellow flowers.

Spanish broom is a leguminous plant and is capable of drawing Nitrogen directly from the air and converting it, using bacteria on it’s roots, into an available nutrient- essentially feeding itself! This capability allows Spanish broom and other leguminous plants (like acacias) to survive in the driest, poorest of Mediterranean soils. Spanish broom and acacia are two of the main plants that are used to enrich poor, worthless soils during a soil rehabilitation process. Spanish broom is renowned for becoming straggly and un-attractive after a few years but this can be easily avoided by pruning the plant correctly. Prune Spanish broom by cutting back faded immediately after flowering to within 2 or 3 inches of old wood. Around a third of old stems should be removed to the base of the plant to ensure a cycle of new flowering wood. To renovate an old, straggly Spanish broom plant, simply cut all the stems to the base of the plant in early March.

Cytisus praecox is another yellow sunshine provider and should be pruned in the same way as the Spanish broom.

The yellow-flowered acacia tree (Acacia dealbata), commonly known as Mimosa erupts into an explosive yellow display through late winter and into spring and is really the strongest Italian symbol of the spring’s arrival. Yellow-leaved forms of the False acacia tree (Robinia pseudoacacia) provide the same Mediterranean symbolism as an acacia tree, being laden with sharp thorns and almost identical in shape to the real acacia tree, bringing sunshine to the Italian garden as long as they’re in leaf. Mahonia japonica is not the most interesting of plants but in late winter/early spring it does provide an impressive show of yellow flowers and it can be used to illuminate the shadiest of corner, as it tolerates very dense shade. The tall, yellow Flag Iris (Iris pseudacorus) is a great plant for moist areas of the garden that receive sunshine. It grows easily and spreads quickly to cover large, moist banks near streams but it will even resist slightly drier soil conditions. The flowers of this yellow iris and the other plants mentioned (not forgetting the classic daffodil!) provide the Italian garden with a surprise, symbolic splash of Italian sunshine right when it’s needed the most- in early spring. Bring a little splash of sunshine into your life!

Jonathan Radford