Grow it
Jacob's ladder is a good choice for city gardeners
May 26, 2010
Sonia Day
SPECIAL TO THE STAR
Polemonium
If you like blue hues in flowers (and they are, my deah, the mark of a “classy” gardener) Jacob’s ladder is a dependable old stalwart which pops up reliably every spring.
Indeed, I find it almost TOO reliable. Every May, I keep finding new little “ladders” because the plant’s seeds seem to waft everywhere. But not to worry. They’re easy to dig out.
And this is a good choice for city gardeners, because it grows about 30cms high and is one of the few that will produce fair-sized flowers in partial shade. These are a pretty blue-bordering-on-lilac with tangerine dots in their centres.
The name Jacob’s ladder comes from the similarity of the stacked leaves to an old kind of ladder. It’s most noticeable when the plant has finished blooming. Each leaf supposedly looks like a rung on either side of a centre rail.
Whatever, about a decade ago, gardeners went nuts over a new very different kind of Polemonium called Brise d’Anjou. It boasted leaves striped in green and cream — wildly different from the regular Jacob’s Ladder, so we all rushed out and paid big bucks for one. What suckers we were. The ballyhoo soon bit the dust, because this trendy upstart got attacked by bugs and didn’t last long in the garden. I also came to the conclusion the stripey leaves looked uncomfortably like fat caterpillars. In Canada, you now rarely encounter the fair Brise.
However, other variations on this popular perennial are always coming out. And there’s a native North American version called P. reptans which has a mounded shape, rather than producing spires. But after the Brise d’Anjou debacle, I’m sticking with old tried-and-true P. caeruleum. It does look sort of classy.
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