Red hot pokers have languished unloved since the 1970s, an easy target for the taste police. Evergreens and semi-evergreens are the perfect foil for these South African specimens.
Photography by Jim Powell for Gardenista.
Kniphofia rooperi with jagged leaves of Melianthus major, grown by Gillian Archer at Perrycroft, near Malvern.
Introduced to the UK in 1921, ‘Royal Standard’ would have been one of the few varieties available when the garden at Sissinghurst was first made, and it became a very popular plant (a photograph of Virginia Woolf surrounded by 1930s kniphofias puts it in context).
At the height of summer, when there is so much to choose from, it is easier to quibble about the desirability of a red hot poker.
For more Bloomsbury flowers, see: Required Reading: Virginia Woolf’s Garden.
Kniphofia rooperi in a pot at Old Court Nurseries.
Kniphofia rooperi, bringing out the color and shape of its neighbors.
Kniphofias growing in the garden at Old Court Nurseries, amid specimen pines.
At Great Dixter in East Sussex, a good plant with a bad image will always be shown to its best advantage and Kniphofia rooperi has found a home in its barn garden.
Dwarf mountain pine (Pinus mugo) would work, while the more yellow Pinus Strobus ‘Hillside Winter Gold’ (shown here) provides the backdrop in the Old Court Nurseries garden, near Malvern, England.