It was a dark and stormy night, and as the people of uk.rec.gardening
huddled around the fire, Rod told them this story:

"flake" wrote in message
...
I have himalayan balsam in the garden and now understand it's a notifiable
weed. I quite like the plant; grows tall (5.5' - 6'), pretty, delicate
flowers throughout the summer, bees love it and the slugs ignore it. But
now I'm looking for alternatives.

Foxgloves would do well in that situation - the yellow species are worth
trying as well as the native D. purpurea. Verbascums - white and yellow
species.

But foxgloves wouldn`t smell so wonderfully of peaches..

We were walking in the park one summer's day when we were struck in the
face by the scent of peaches. It took us a while to work out where it
came from, but when we did, we vowed to have some of that in our garden.
We collected seeds and sowed them in the spring, but they grew very
slowly and had only just flowered when they were killed off by that hard
frost back in October. The ones in the park had pretty much finished by
then, so no balsam for us next year.

We reckon they grew so slowly because we sowed them too close to the
hedge, not at that point realising that a) balsam normally lives by
rivers and likes it damp and b) hedges dry out the soil.

Still, we had two huge foxgloves that produced loads of seeds, so maybe
we will just have to make do with foxgloves. And the lupins we grew
from seed this year. We tried delphiniums but none of them got beyond
two leaves all summer. I`m not sure why, maybe they didn`t like the
compost..

Rhiannon