Yellow Wave Flax Lily Plants

Phormium tenax 'Yellow Wave' Flax Lily Plants. 3 Litre Pots

These undemanding ornamental plants, with their vibrant yellow-green striped, arching leaves, add a note of exotic brightness to a garden all year around. Phormiums do not flower reliably in Britain. Occasionally, they produce tall stalks of rusty-red blooms around July.

Browse our other Phormium varieties or all our perennial plants.

Features

• Green leaves with bright yellow-green stripes.
• Flowers irregularly. Red, around July
• Grows on the coast
• Hardiness rating H4
• Height x Spread: 1.5m x 1.5m
• RHS Award of Garden Merit

Growing Yellow Wave Phormiums

Phormiums love a sunny, well drained location with light, loamy soil. With a hardiness rating of H4 from the RHS, they are suitable for most of the UK, apart from the colder inland and Northern areas of Scotland.

Tidy in Spring by pruning out the biggest / oldest and most winter-damaged leaves, cutting them at the bottom - if you trim the leaves higher up, they will look ragged and unsightly. Make a diagonal cut flush with the base of the other leaves, rather than a flat cut, which will leave a straggly little stub.

This pruning requires reaching down inside the foliage, which has pointed tips, so wear proper goggles or a face shield when working with mature plants. Secateurs are all you need, but for cutting off unwanted shoots on well established plants, a grape harvesting hook (a type of small, sharp serrated sickle) is nifty for slicing them easily at soil level without dulling your secateurs.

Dividing a big phormium clump is easier with a sharp, sturdy spade to help you dig around all around it, and then lift the whole rootball. Once it's out, it will be easier to see where to break the clumps apart from one another by splitting them with the spade: the rhizomes are very tough but come apart from each other with some firm spade and bodyweight effort, wiggling it into the natural gaps between the clump sections as you go - if your spade is dull after digging, sharpening it will make this work a lot easier.

At the end of dividing a big clump, trim the leaves down to stumps in order to help the roots establish. Doing this will give you a bigger plant in subsequent years at the cost of having nice looking leaves this and next year.

In Your Garden Design

Would look good as a punctuation plant at the end of a border or in a large pot on a roof terrace or a town garden. Go all exotic and follow a green theme adding palms and ferns and infuse with splashes of colour using Scilla Caribbean Jewels, Geranium Pink Spice and Dianthus Passion or elements of our Hot and Spicy collection.