Gillenia
Gillenia trifoliata (Bowman's Root)
“The designer's secret weapon. Small white flowers on dark stems with effortless poise, autumn colour as a bonus, and the ability to make every neighbouring plant look more elegant.”
— ROSIE
Rosie's Take
Gillenia trifoliata is the plant I recommend to people who say they want something elegant but don't know what that means. This is elegance defined: slender, wiry, dark-red stems carrying loose sprays of small, white, five-petalled flowers that look like tiny butterflies or stars scattered through the air. The petals are narrow and asymmetric, giving each flower a slightly windswept, spontaneous quality — as if a breeze has just caught them. Nothing is stiff. Nothing is forced. Everything is exactly right.
It flowers in June and July, and the effect in a border is of white confetti suspended at waist height. The flowers are individually small — less than an inch across — but produced in such generous quantities that the overall impression is of a white cloud hovering above the foliage. And when the petals fall, they drift downward like snow, collecting on the leaves of lower plants in the prettiest possible way.
The foliage is good too — trifoliate leaves on those dark, wiry stems, creating a fine-textured, bushy clump about three feet tall. In autumn, the leaves turn rich orange and crimson, which is an unexpected bonus from a plant you bought for its summer flowers. The red calyces persist after the petals drop, adding their own small ornament.
It's one of those plants that makes everything around it look better. Put it next to a rose and the rose looks less stiff. Thread it through heavier perennials and they look less solid. Like gaura, like gypsophila, it's a plant that softens and lifts. But where gaura is a bit wild and gypsophila a bit frothy, gillenia is composed. Poised. The kind of plant a good garden designer reaches for instinctively and an average one overlooks entirely.
✿ From the folklore cabinet
Gillenia trifoliata is native to the woodlands of eastern North America, where it grows in the understory of deciduous forest from Ontario to Georgia. Native Americans used the root as an emetic — hence the common name 'Indian physic' or 'Bowman's root.' The genus is named after Arnold Gillen, a seventeenth-century German botanist. In recent years, gillenia has become a darling of the 'New Perennial' movement — designers like Piet Oudolf and Dan Pearson use it extensively for its transparency and grace. It's one of those plants that's been quietly growing in American woods for millennia and has only just been noticed by the garden world. Late discoveries are sometimes the sweetest.
