Pale purple and white bell shaped flowers and dark red buds drooping downwards on the stems of a green plant with large leaves with deep veins with a pattern of small squares.
Blooms on my comfrey (photo by author)

Garden

Humphrey the Comfrey

A beautiful and useful plant for the garden

Jean Crawford Evans 🧙‍♀️
SNAPSHOTS
Published in
2 min readJun 13, 2023

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In 2021 I located a comfrey plant to put into my garden. Monty Don from BBC’s Gardener’s World is a big fan of comfrey as it makes a very good liquid compost for your plants (if you can get past the smell as it brews).

You can also harvest the leaves, chop them up and use them as mulch around your plants, which is my plan for my comfrey, which I have named Humphrey since it rhymes with comfrey and makes it easier to remember what the plant is actually called.

Tall plant with many stems, large pointed green leaves, and light purple and white bell shaped flowers planted in a raised garden bed with weeds and grass and a greenhouse in the background.
Russian Comfrey (Symphytum × uplandicum) cultivar called Bocking 14 (photo by author)

The comfrey has taken to the raised bed I put it in. I haven’t split the plant yet, I will do that either this fall or early next spring so I can have two, if not three comfreys in my garden. It depends on how big the crown has gotten by then.

I love the flower buds as they are getting ready, such a beautiful shade of red on the bright green stems.

Close up of a bright green plant stem with green leaves and small dark red flower buds drooping fromm the top stems.
Flower buds on the comfrey (photo by author)

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