Garden angel for a year or two

Like (it seems) most plants and animals on Earth not native to New Zealand prior to Maori and especially European settlement, Angelica pachderma is now well established in that modern day Eden for invasive species. 

Not the Angelica that is eaten, drunk and prescribed, Angelica archangelica, which I posted on from Kew Gardens in London a life-time (10 years) ago. This particular relative of the celery, carrot and parsley is grown mostly for its nice glossy leaves and chunky flower clusters.

Which I presume is why it is grown at Burnley Gardens, where I took these photographs in late August this year (within my five kilometre limit at the time of the pandemic Stage 4 restrictions). It's original home - before it got to New Zealand and Burnley Gardens - was north-west Spain and western Portugal. Hence the sometime common name, Spanish Angelica.

Like all plants in the family Apiaceae, the flowers are in an umbel, an umbrella-like arrangement familiar to us from when our parsley goes to seed. If you look closely you can see umbels within umbels.

Most parts of the plant have a faint aniseed odor when crushed, a hint of another garden plant in this family, fennel. However not as pungent an odor as Angelica archangelica. Compared to that species, the umbels - those umbrellas of flowers - are flatter (see my pictures of the lovely rounded heads on archangelica here).

Each Spanish Angelica flower, however is pretty much the same as most other Apiaceae, with five small outer parts (sepals), five petals, five male bits (stamens) and two female bits (carpels, or ovaries). Although in the plants I saw the curly petals are green rather than white (the usually green parts of a flower, the sepals, are far smaller than this and the next layer out).

There were also umbels starting to set seed, similar to that of parsley, and looking quite beautiful as the stamens fall away leaving just the mounded top of the ovary chamber with the two female receptive 'styles' hovering above.

As with other Angelica, this is a technically a biennial rather than an annual or perennial. Each plant lives for two years: the chunky stems and leaves produced in the first and the flower stalks in the second.

Once the fruits are ripe, the plants dies. That's when you should remove the flowering stalk, or give it a good shake, and collect some seed.

When Catriona McLeod blogged on this for Garden Drum a few years ago, she described it as 'much showier than its edible cousin' and with 'stiff leaves arch[ing] outwards gracefully'. She notes both the leaves and the flowers will last well in a vase.

So don't eat it but as has been said of our wattle, you can 'stick it in a bottle or hold it in your hand'.

The oldest English Oak at Burnley Gardens, photographed on the same day and alive for at least 148 more years than the Spanish Angelica. It's just starting to produce another canopy of leaves, its 150th or so.