Don’t you just love to watch hollyhocks weaving about on a breezy day? How do they stand up from such a tiny base? It’s good to have plants like that in a garden. They look brave, gutsy — clippers on the ocean wave.
Of course, a garden needs shapes of all kinds. It needs its big heavy evergreen shapes, its moored cruise liners, to anchor the scene; its colourful regatta of beds and borders across the middle of the scene; and it needs those taller, aspiring vertical shapes to draw your eye upwards to the sun and sky.
An array of hollyhocks in a walled garden
GAP PHOTOS/MARK BOLTON
Those verticals can vary too. There are the solid columns of conifers or the very different organ-pipe stems of miscanthus grasses and the giant reed (Arundo
