Arum italicum is the plant that gets the year the wrong way round. Its leaves come up in autumn, glossy and spear shaped and marbled all over in cream, and they stand through the whole of winter while everything near them is bare, then fade away in early summer as the rest of the garden fills out. What it leaves behind in late summer is a fat spike of orange red berries on a naked stem. Our catalogue called it an excellent foliage plant. That rather undersells the berries.
Why Does It Come Up In Autumn
Because it does its growing while it has the light to itself. Under a deciduous tree the branches are bare from October to April, which is exactly when the arum is in full leaf and taking a low winter sun that no summer plant ever sees. By the time the canopy closes over again the leaves have done their work and died back, and the tuber spends the summer resting underground. It is not a tender thing either. The foliage shrugs off frosts that flatten everything around it.
What Are The Orange Berries
The one thing everyone remembers about it. Once the leaves have gone in early summer the plant pushes up bare stalks, and by late summer each one carries a tight club of berries that ripen from green through yellow to the brilliant orange red in the photograph above. They are as showy as anything the late garden offers. They are also poisonous, as every part of this plant is, so wear gloves when you handle the tubers and keep the berries well away from small children, who find a colour like that very hard to leave alone.
Where Does Arum Italicum Grow Best
In the shade that sees off almost everything else. Dry shade is the hardest ground in any garden, because the tree that casts the shade also drinks the rain before it ever reaches what you plant beneath, and arum italicum is one of a mere handful of things that will furnish such a spot and look glossy doing it. The tuber sits well down, below the worst of the root mat, which is half the secret. Heavy clay suits it and a little summer moisture gives the biggest leaves. The only ground it truly hates is dry sand in full sun.
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How Do You Plant Arum Italicum
Ten centimetres deep and about fifteen apart, tubers going in from September. Give it a moist spot to settle into and it increases quickly, a single tuber thickening into a broad clump of overlapping leaves inside a few years. After that there is nothing to do. It is hardy enough to want no protection, slugs and deer leave it alone, and once it has decided it likes you it seeds itself gently about, which in a shady corner is precisely the point.
Is It The Same As Lords And Ladies
Same family, far better mannered. The wild lords and ladies of English hedgerows is Arum maculatum, a close cousin with plain green leaves, while the garden plant is Arum italicum, the Italian one, grown for the cream veining that the native lacks. The marbled form we sell is Marmoratum, which you will sometimes see labelled Pictum, and it holds an Award of Garden Merit. Both carry the same hooded spring flower and the same poison. Only the italicum earns its place on the strength of those winter leaves.
What To Plant With It
Small bulbs that want a backdrop in the bleak months. The marbled leaves stand from midwinter into spring, exactly when snowdrops and winter aconites are out, and a scatter of white or yellow reads far better over glossy arum than over cold bare soil. Push the little bulbs in among the tubers and let them come up through the leaves. Wood anemones and erythroniums take the same ground on into April, and by the time the arum retreats for its summer rest they have finished too. One shady square metre, something in it from November to May.
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