The Spotted Dead Nettle is from the mint family, but beware, buy the wrong variety and you’ll have it for life, warns gardening columnist JACKIE WARBURTON. 

Here’s a terrific evergreen groundcover for shady areas of the garden and a great understory plant for trees and shrubs, but you have to keep your wits about you when buying it. 

The Spotted Dead Nettle (Lamium maculatum) is from the mint family, but beware, buy the wrong variety and you’ll have it for life!

The easy way to know if it is invasive or not is do NOT buy the yellow-flowering variety Lamium galeobdolon. The other varieties that have blue/violet or white flowers are a lot more tame. 

The silver, heart-shaped, interesting leaves keep the plant attractive when it’s not in flower in the winter. Keeping it in check and deadheading encourages a more compact growth, but this is a plant that wants to sprawl and cover the ground. It’s a perfect plant to cascade over retaining walls and pots, and great for suppressing weeds on slopes or hard-to-access ground. 

Despite its common name, it’s not botanically a nettle plant at all and doesn’t possess the sting that nettle plants have.

It transitions well from shade to sun and can tolerate both conditions and is really a tough underrated plant and contrasts well with green foliage and is well suited to any style of garden. 

Lamium orvala is an unusual, clump-forming plant that can be cut to the ground annually. It forms a neat clump of heart-shaped leaves in the warmer months. It grows much taller than its counterpart and can get to 60 centimetres with lovely pink/maroon flowers in late winter to early spring. 

Lamiums are generally pest resistant if their growing conditions are correct and can be a very low-maintenance, long-lived plant. 

A HARDY flowering plant, untroubled by frosts is Aloiampelos striatula. It was formerly known as Aloe striatula, but in the last 10 years taxonomists have moved several aloes to their own genius Aloi Ampelos, which consists of rambling, shrubbery plants with slender leaves such as Ciliaris, which is a yellow-flowering, frost-tender climber and Striatula, which is more shrub-like and grows in Canberra. 

A tough evergreen, this messy looking shrub will flower from spring to late autumn. Its nectar flowers are highly attractive honey eaters and other native birds. In my garden, these plants survive on rainfall and still flower and grow well. 

Propagate by pruning the tall stems to keep the growth of the parent plant compact. The cuttings should be left to dry for a few days so the bottom of the stem can callous over, then potted in a good mix and placed in the shade. Water sparingly so they don’t dry out. 

Sometimes the spent flower head will have round seeds that can be removed and placed in a paper bag to dry out. When the seed falls into the bag from the seed capsule, they can be sown in a seed-raising mix and, when the temperature is over 20C°, kept moist and out of the cool weather. 

The most common, Aloe vera, is still in the aloe family and can be grown in Canberra. However, it needs to be protected from frost and grows well in pots that can be brought indoors. It will eventually grow into a small mound and make a great medicinal plant to have in the garden. 

Jottings 

• Keep brassicas netted against white cabbage moths.

• Get garlic in the ground and plant out in stages. 

• Fertilise winter-flowering plants such as daphne and sasanqua camellias. 

• Sow and transplant lettuce into the garden. 

jackwar@home.netspeed.com.au