Tumbling Ted: from bare roots to full bloom in two seasons

Tumbling Ted — Saponaria ocymoides — is a trailing alpine. Small bright pink flowers in late spring, dense enough to hide the leaves underneath. The sort of plant you see spilling over old stone walls. Drought-tolerant once established, which was what I was after.

The Farmer Gracy order arrived in paper bags, each one feeling almost empty when you picked it up — a tangle of dry roots, a printed label. I laid them out on the patio table before planting, not for any particular reason, just working out what went where before committing.

The planter had just been filled with compost. I spaced the roots along the front edge, watered them in, and that was it.

There were small shoots coming through the compost. Not many, but enough to know something was happening.

By June there were trailing stems and a few flowers. Modest. I thought about pulling it out and putting something showier in. I am glad I did not.

This spring it came back completely different. The planter was already covered in pink before I had got started on much else — dense curtains of it spilling down the sides, hundreds of flowers, visible from the gate. On a clear evening when the light is low it looks extraordinary.

Full sun if you can give it. Any well-drained compost or soil — mine has some grit mixed in. Water in after planting and then more or less leave it alone; once the roots are established it handles dry spells well. After flowering, cut back by about a third. It tends to produce another flush later in summer, and the cut keeps it from going woody.

I grow most things for a reason — marigolds for the aphids, borage for the bees, nasturtiums to lure blackfly off the beans. Tumbling Ted has no practical use at all. In May, when everything else is still mostly underground, it is the thing that makes the plot feel like somewhere worth coming to.