As part of a major renovation, the courtyard at London’s Garden Museum has been redesigned into a lush, inspiring space – and it features our favorite canna!
“A surreal sense of wonder and of the exotic prevails” in the new garden, as though visitors are “ambling into a Rousseau painting,” says the February 2020 Gardens Illustrated, Since the pioneering horticulturists John Tradescant the Elder and Younger are buried in the garden (the Museum is housed in a former church), designer Dan Pearson wanted the garden to “rekindle the same sense of wonder that 17th-century visitors to the Tradescants’ nursery may have felt.”
Although every plant in the garden “is a treasure in itself, all of them take their place in a cogent, multi-layered composition.” Among the “cast of strong individual characters” is Canna ‘Ehemanii’, which the article describes as one of “the most magnificent of the canna lilies, with considerable heft and stature.” With its “hot pink, gracefully pendulous” flowers nodding over “huge, paddle-shaped leaves,” this striking heirloom is a key player in creating the garden’s “otherworldly atmosphere.”
To add a bit of otherworldly atmosphere to your own garden, why not give ‘Ehemanni’ a try this spring? All it needs is full sun and plenty of water – and having grown it in my own garden for years, I can’t imagine summer without gorgeous, graceful ‘Ehemanii’.
