My favourite plant family: the umbels

They're the most beautiful, hard working plants on the planet and they WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE

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This is the hardest newsletter I’ve ever had to write.

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…Because every bloody time I sit down to try to get the words out I somehow blink and find myself shopping for plants, again.

This has happened before, countless times. I decide to tell you about asparagus, I wind up buying asparagus. I write a newsletter extolling the virtues of a wildflower meadow and, moments later, I have a shopping cart full of seeds I don’t need. To those of you who have purchased paid memberships to this newsletter and to my gardening club members, all I can say is: thank you. This is far more costly an exercise than you may realise.

Today, however, my shopping cart is depressingly empty. The hunt I’ve been on has proven - so far - fruitless, as it appears the plant I want isn’t even allowed into Western Australia. My browser is cluttered with open tabs, my bank cards remain stowed away and my bank balance is irritatingly unchanged. Bah humbug.

So I suppose I should actually tell you what it is I’m hunting for. Angelica sylvestris “Vicars Mead” - a purple stemmed, structural beauty, with dark mauve flower heads that float atop the stems like clouds. To add insult to injury, if you are reading this newsletter from basically anywhere apart from Western Australia you should be able to get seeds for this little plant pretty easily.

To my fellow West Australians: this is why I write my newsletter. We have sandy soils, blisteringly hot summers and impenetrable quarantine laws that, rationally, I fully support, but I’d be a liar if I said they didn’t break my heart from time to time.

But I’m drifting dazedly away from the topic at hand. Today I want to tell you about not just one beautiful plant, but an entire family of incredible plants. Most of which, mercifully, we definitely CAN grow on the west coast. Today I want to tell you about the Umbel family.

The Umbelliferous plant family is a large, sprawling family that includes many edible plants you’ll already be familiar with (we’ll get to those in a mo’). It also goes by several names. Officially, it’s called the Apiaceae or Umbelliferae family, but colloquially it is also often referred to as