Ground cover one actually covets

Stachys. An amazing ground cover plant. Leslie brought me a box of yanked up plants a few years ago. And I thought it would be useful dotted in among the lavenders, santolinas, ballotta, nepeta and rosemaries in the barn garden.

Hah. It doesn’t do ‘dotting’. It spreads.

But what a brilliant invasive little ground cover. It is easily yanked up and moved elsewhere when you notice a small ballota plant drowing under the thrusting felty leaves.

And it does an amazing job of linking the frankly tricky greys of lavender with the rest of the greener plants in this shrub garden.

Best of all, and I’m yet to see it in action, there is a specific bee that needs this plant. It is called a Wool Carding Bee and only uses this one plant to make its nest.  The male bee will hover near the stachys plants when they throw up their flowering spikes, and then the female will fly in ad take the ‘wool’ for her nest.

It makes you want to set up a chair right beside this amazing plant and look out for the even more amazing bee.  But chairs? Sitting? Hasn’t been done yet in almost eight years of gardening. Why, I only plopped on the hammock once this season, and that was an experiment to see if Artur would like a rocking chair experience as he sat on my lap.

He didn’t.