Tara is the Hindu goddess of mercy and protector of travellers over perilous terrain. It is also the Nepalese word for “star”. Either was reason enough for Tony Schilling to give the name first to his daughter and then to a plant whose stellar beauty is only now, after 30 years, shining bright in our gardens.
But before the plant, the man. If Schilling could be said to conform to anything, it is to the romantic ideal of the explorer-botanist. His Himalayan expeditions would have brought him fame for their daring alone, but they have also brought us dozens of new plants. He is the kind of man Arthur Conan Doyle might have had to invent — and the Doyle not of Baker Street but The Lost World. Then there is glorious Wakehurst Place in West Sussex, which hit its stride as “Kew ‘s place in the country” under Schilling’s visionary curatorship. Possibly the best tribute to him, however, is the progress of a plant with which he is so intimately associated — from “unknown” to “rare and difficult” to “surprisingly hardy but hard to come by”, arriving finally at “easy, available, fabulous”.
Hedychium ‘Tara’ started as a handful of seeds which Schilling collected in November 1972 on the 2,280m-high (7,500ft) Nagarkot Ridge in the Kathmandu Valley. Back at Wakehurst Place, they germinated to astonishing effect. The plant can stand two metres tall, producing a clump of reed-like stems from fleshy underground rhizomes (to which, as with other hardy hedychiums, it dies down in winter). The leaves are sea green and surpassingly elegant. Above them, from late summer onwards, the flower spike emerges, decked with butterfly blooms in a warm shade of carnelian picked out with slender saffron stigmas.
Hedychium is a member of the ginger family, and its best-known representative around the time that Schilling was finding his seeds was the garland flower, Hedychium coronarium, a plant one wouldn’t hazard outside a conservatory. This new Himalayan ginger looked every bit as tender and tropical — surely it couldn’t be hardy? Although it withstood winters at Wakehurst and some other adventurous gardens, few seemed prepared to accept that it could spice up a border with no fuss, no fleece and no winter exhumation.
My own Hedychium ‘Tara’ has grown undisturbed for years in a border that is regularly frozen. It is, I will admit, beside a sunny wall, but most sheltered spots where the soil can warm up will do — in sun or lightly dappled shade. What it does need is a rich soil that stays moist but is open in texture and free-draining, so incorporate grit and garden compost, coir or composted bark. It is also, once established, a fairly greedy plant, relishing the odd liquid feed in summer. Come winter, I simply cut down the old stems and mulch the crown thickly with compost. As for companions, I grow it among bronze-leaved heucheras and the sun-proof fern, Dryopteris erythrosora, whose new fronds appear through the summer in shields of shining copper. But ‘Tara’, as the Nepalese know, is a star — there’s no real need for a Fred to join this Ginger.
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She’s not quite alone, however; nor was she the first to shine. Tony Schilling described another hardy ginger in that gourmet gardener’s glossy The Plantsman, “an outstandingly beautiful one I collected in eastern Nepal during the monsoon of 1966”. Named for his son who was born in Kathmandu that same year, Hedychium ‘Stephen’ is about a metre tall with spikes of large parchment flowers trimmed with topaz anthers. It exudes a heavy nocturnal perfume, like lilies. Then there is Hedychium ‘Assam Orange’, an introduction from 1938 and possibly the hardiest of all. A slim plant, its dark amber or tangerine flowers are packed in cylinders and scented of very good, slightly boozy, vanilla custard. And more have arrived in garden centres this year — the ivory and peach Hedychium chrysoleucum; H. greenei with maroon-backed leaves and spicy coral flowers.
One word of caution: hedychiums are late risers, so worry only if you don’t get a peep from them by late June. The upside of that is that they are also reliably late performers.
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These gingers are available from garden centres and by mail order from KobaKoba, 2 High Street, Ashcott, Bridgwater, Somerset (01458 210700; www.kobakoba.co.uk).
Wakehurst Place, Ardingly, Haywards Heath, is open daily from 10am-7pm (www.kew.org)