Home Decor Projects Observer

When Vita Sackville-West pondered over winter plants for north-facing walls, she listed Morello cherry and winter-flowering jasmine—neither surprising in an English garden of a certain vintage. Also, silk tassel bush, another once-typical choice that is now overlooked. Sheltered, with space to spread, Garrya elliptica is terribly elegant, in an Edwardian kind of way. It is in fact an American West Coast native; it’s sea salt-tolerant and very hardy. In colder places, like rural England, it has an affinity with frost, its silver-tinged leaves drawing attention to exceptionally long catkins.

Photography by Britt Willoughby Dyer, for Gardenista.

Members of the Garryaceae family are named after a secretary of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Nicholas Garry, who helped to organize the North American expeditions for British plant hunters in the 19th century. “Elliptica” refers to the wavy-edged, evergreen leaves. Garrya has male and female plants, with tassels or catkins that are wind-pollinated. For the most spectacular tassels, it’s important to choose a male over a female. More specifically, Garrya elliptica ‘James Roof’ carries an Royal Horticultural Society award of garden merit and its catkins are from 8 to 14 inches long.

Garrya elliptica is the kind of thing you’d expect to see draping the doorway into a walled garden, facing north (or east), while plants on the other side bask in the sun. This is where I first saw one, at Kelmarsh Hall in Northamptonshire, and the setting was perfect; dripping catkins perfectly complementing the early 20th-century gardens, surrounding an early 18th-century house.