Red Hot Poker

Red hot pokers divide opinion more than almost any other garden plant. Some people love the drama; others find them brash and aggressive. I understand both sides. The standard orange-and-yellow varieties can feel like they're shouting at you. But 'Tawny King' is different — it's the red hot poker that went on a gap year and came back calmer.

The colour is warm rather than hot — a soft, tawny amber that fades to cream as the florets open from the bottom of the spike upward. It's the burnt-honey tone of late summer light, and it sits in a border without dominating everything around it the way the fiercer varieties do.

The shape is still dramatic — that tall, rocket-like spike rising above strap-shaped foliage — but the muted colour means it plays well with others. Next to ornamental grasses, heleniums, and late roses, it's genuinely lovely. It provides the same vertical punctuation as a delphinium but with an entirely different mood — warmer, earthier, more end-of-summer.

I've grown mine for years and they've steadily formed a substantial clump that reliably produces a dozen spikes every August. They attract bees like nothing else — I've counted six on a single spike — and the structural form persists well into autumn even after the flowers are spent. Not a flower for the faint-hearted, but 'Tawny King' is the one that might convert the sceptics.