Garden and Flowers

Plants that are called new are often rediscovered treasures. This is true of Orlaya grandiflora, which may be included in books on the wild plants of Europe, but is not to be found in even the very fattest volumes on plants for the garden. It self-seeded freely in the olive groves of Tuscany, and on other dry, warm hillsides in southern and central Europe, but nobody made the effort to market the seed of this annual plant for growing in a garden. Those days are now past, and it looks as though Orlaya grandiflora has a golden future in the garden.

The plants grow to about 32 in tall, producing bipinnate foliage and bearing white (or sometimes pale pink) ray flowers in full umbels. Superficially, they resemble Ammi majus, but the outer flowers are larger and look like small white pendent hearts. It makes a suitable filler in a natural garden and a splendid cut flower. The plants self-seed in suitable places and germinate in autumn. It is therefore best to sow them in autumn. In the Dutch climate, the seedlings survive most winters as small rosettes. They shoot up rapidly in spring and may come into flower by early June. The flowers last for two months at the most, but you may still enjoy the umbels of extremely bristly seeds for a while after that.

Orlaya grandiflora does best in fairly dry sandy soil, or clay that is kept loose. In very humus-rich or fertilized soil, there is a considerable likelihood of infestation by carrot fly. It is therefore simply a matter of trying out whether the plant does well in a particular spot. If it does, you will see Orlaya grandiflora again every year.