Alys Fowler: a little neglect goes a long way in a garden

I don’t mean to neglect you, I tell the garden, but I have. I hurriedly try to squeeze in a few more lettuces that have spent too long in modules. I ignore the fact that the young chard already has blisters of leaf miner and pretend not to notice that the slugs have razed nearly a whole tray of beans.

Plantago major ‘Rosularis’ will self-seed readily. Photograph: Heather Edwards/GAP

The garden sighs a little, flops about like a bored teenager and offers up a strawberry or two. I sit down on the bench and wonder if there’s any point unpicking this mess. It is already too late to stake; I could cut back, but the bees are enjoying the riot. Instead, I eat more strawberries and hunt around for a raspberry or two.

I don’t feel bad for the garden. It’s having fun sowing what it likes, where it pleases. Parsnips appear in strange places and it’s filled all the gaps with opium poppies and other oddities. Plantago major ‘Rubrifolia’ is coming up all over the place. This plant deserves more recognition. It’s a dark purple-leaved form of the greater plantain, P. major, a wild thing of disturbed places, path edges, tracks, gateways and cultivated grounds. It’s one of those plants that knows exactly where to seed itself – never where you might imagine, but once you see it there, resplendent with its large leaves, you think, “How clever.”

In a similar vein is P. major ‘Rosularis’, which has been in cultivation since medieval times. Its strange double flowers are often described as rose-like. I think a rose might be angered by this description: they are large and green and very odd, though in a good way. It reaches 15cm or so and is happy in shade or sun, self-seeding readily. It loves gravel paths and well-drained margins, though if you give it lush conditions it will rise to the challenge in a luxurious manner. P. major ‘Frills’ is a curly, parsley-like version that looks best in a pot, where you can admire its strangeness up close, but is lost among other things in a border.

If you can’t get hold of a plant, you can sow these varieties at any time of year, though spring is fastest and the majority of the seed will wait till then. Seed germinates best in very free-draining compost, so add up to 50% grit if necessary.

All these plantains are edible, but you’d have to be very hungry to want to eat them. The young leaves are best when very small, and can be used as a pot herb (aka a leafy green substitute).

However, there is one plantain that is worth eating. P. coronopus, buckshorn plantain, is still widely grown in Italy as a green, where it is known as erba stella. The leaves work wonderfully in salads when picked young and crunchy, or lightly steamed as a vehicle for butter. It’s a tough nut, growing in heavily compacted ground, and doesn’t even mind being trampled on. It’s a perfect edge plant for the vegetable garden, where it will make an excellent frill to any bed.