An anticlimax

Galanthus 'Green Tear'

After a week of speculation, the next big Ebay snowdrop auction failed to match or exceed the price paid on 24 January for 'E.A. Bowles' (£357). With every galanthophile in Britain watching the screen, bidding for 'Green Tear', offered by vendor Ramonhoi, ended a few minutes ago at £320 - "only £320" as Mark Smyth wrote on the Scottish Rock Garden Club's forum. Only!

Mild but wild

Galanthus 'Lady Beatrix Stanley' -
a really reliable, long-flowering plant.

As promised on ITV West's weather forecast on Friday evening, delivered from Colesbourne by Bob Crampton, the weekend has been exceedingly windy and very dull, with only a couple of glimpses of sunshine today, but not much rain materialized. The wind brought down most of an old Sycamore tree, plus a ton of sticks and branches on Friday night, which is not what we needed to have to deal with on Saturday morning. The fallen tree was no impediment to opening, however, having landed only on snowdrops, and we opened the garden for the first time this year on schedule at 1 pm on Saturday afternoon. It was a bit blustery yesterday but a loyal crowd of enthusisasts turned out, and more came today. I had been afraid that the the display would be a bit meagre, but the mild westerlies have encouraged very rapid development of the snowdrops and other flowers, so there was in fact plenty to see. The snowdrops will continue to develop over the next few weeks, hopefully well enough to earn the  description 'Britain's best snowdrops' bestowed on them by Jeremy Lazell in today's Sunday Times . (He also recommended the Colesbourne Inn's lamb burger with goat cheese and red onion jam, a choice with which I heartily concur.)


fallen Sycamore and Galanthus elwesii

 

Snowdrops for sale



The Spring Garden - sunshine would be welcome

Visitors in the Spring Garden

Galanthus elwesii 'Mrs Macnamara' - early and elegant



Snowdrops in the sun

Galanthus plicatus 'Colossus'

 After the past few cold grey days, today's warm sunshine was a real pleasure. Here are a few snowdrops at Colesbourne Park this afternoon.

G. plicatus 'Colossus'

Galanthus 'Ding Dong'

G. elwesii 'J. Haydn'

And a dark Crocus tommasinianus.

The myth spreads

The untrue story that the now famous Ebay sale of Galanthus plicatus 'E.A. Bowles' was 'bred' by me has now reached the front page of The Daily Telegraph and elsewhere. The facts have been clearly stated in my previous posts on the subject, but some journalist has put two and two together and made five.

Neither Colesbourne Gardens nor I have ever sold a snowdrop on Ebay.

Crocuses, by Jānis Rukšāns

Crocus atticus subsp. sublimis 'Tricolor'



At intervals of 30-40 years, for the past two centuries, a major monograph on the genus Crocus has appeared in English. The sequence starts in 1809 with Adrian Haworth's 'On the cultivation of crocuses with a short account of the different species known at present', followed by William Herbert's 'A History of the species of Crocus' in 1847. George Maw's beautifully illustrated Monograph of the Genus Crocus appeared in 1886, and remained the dominant botanical monograph for nearly a century. For gardeners, however, the most useful and comfortable reference was E.A. Bowles's A Handbook of Crocus and Colchicum, which interspersed personal experience with botanical fact in a charming and very readable way. It first appeared in 1924, with a revised edition in 1952. In 1982 Brian Mathew published his The Crocus, a then up-to-date account of the genus, and although now showing its age, it remains an invaluable reference. Each of these, and innumerable lesser publications, has built up our knowledge of this remarkable and beautiful genus, whose morphological complexity is belied by the apparent similarity of flower shape in most of its members.

Crocus malyi

 This distinguished line has now been joined by Crocuses, a complete guide to the genus, by the Latvian bulb expert and enthusiast, Jānis Rukšāns, just released by Timber Press. I heard of it circulating in the United States about ten days ago: it was a great relief when my copy arrived on Saturday.  It is seldom that I have sufficient time - or interest - to read a hortico-botanical book through from cover to cover but, despite various distractions over the weekend, I have done it with this fascinating book, and enjoyed every page.

One of my Crocus tommasinianus x C. vernus selections, also illustrated in the book.

This is a botanically-minded gardener's view of crocuses, in the Bowlesian tradition, rather than a botanical monograph like those of Maw or Mathew, but Jānis has the advantage over all his predecessors of having seen the vast majority of the plants he describes in the wild. This gives him a unique perspective into variation within the genus, and within species. With a reasonably generous allocation of photographs, this variation is illustrated as never before in a published work, with the images being of uniformly excellent quality. I note, however, that the image labelled C. korolkowii 'Snow Leopard' is of a different clone to the true entity, featured here last week. On the other hand, one of the pictures (of a Crocus tommasinianus x C. vernus seedling) was taken in this garden, and Jānis is kind enough to mention that he has seen the extreme variability in colour possible in C. tommasinianus here too. 

Crocus heuffelianus selections made by Jānis Rukšāns

Inevitably there are a number of taxonomic changes that will result in familiar plants being relabelled: most garden clones generally called C. sieberi (strictly a Cretan species) should be assigned to C. atticus (mainland Greece), and C. albiflorus (alpine meadows) and C. heuffelianus (northern Central European mountains) are segregated from C. vernus, from more southerly lower places. These make a lot of sense, and I'm sure will be widely accepted, but the proliferation of subspecific taxa (22 at present) in the Crocus biflorus group is mind-boggling and one has to query, as indeed Rukšāns does, if such subdivison by small populations is really useful.

Pinkish selection of C. tommasinianus

It is a great tragedy that cheese-paring by Timber Press led to the excision of 20% of the manuscript of this not particularly large book (only 216 pages) and this economy seems to have been applied to their copy-editing too. Jānis has an idiosyncratic style in English and a voice that needs to be preserved, but the failure to render some sentences grammatical does him and his text no services. An omission that will be felt by many is coverage of familiar clones available in 'the trade' - these are definitely not the author's interest, but it is always handy to be able to check on a comment on something one is more or less familiar with. A very interesting point, however, made repeatedly, is how frequently mass-produced clones are heavily virus-infected and are neither safe nor fit to grow. The reader will need to make compensation for the cultivation notes being derived from Latvan conditions, which are so different to those pertaining in, for example, southern England, but there is a very useful table indicating the conditions each species requires.

Crocuses give me more pleasure in their season than any other flower, and although I make no attempt to grow the more demanding taxa (and there are many!), this book will inspire me afresh to delve deeper into their wonderful diversity. Thank you, Jānis!

Crocus "chrysanthus" 'Cream Beauty'

Galanthus plicatus 'E.A.Bowles' - some corrections

My blog entry from last week on the record price fetched by Galanthus plicatus 'E.A.Bowles' seems to have been widely read and has been picked up on by the press. Unfortunately, innacuracies have crept into the accounts given by The Mail on Sunday (here), the website thisismoney (both written by Toby Walne) and elsewhere, especially an article on http://www.thisisgloucestershire.co.uk/. This claims that the bulb sold was produced at Colesbourne Park, which is not the case.

G. plicatus 'E.A. Bowles' was discovered at Myddelton House, Enfield, (the former home of E.A. Bowles, 1865-1954)  in 2002 by Michael Myers, and was immediately recognized to be an exceptional variety. The garden, run by Lea Valley Parks, made an arrangement with Joe Sharman of Monksilver Nursery that allowed him to propagate the plant in exchange for a royalty on each plant sold. This arrangement has been faithfully adhered to, including the Ebay sales last week, although by error it was stated (and repeated in my post) that the recipient of the funds would be the E.A. Bowles of Myddelton House Society. Andrew Turvey, Head Gardener at Myddelton House, wishes it to make it clear that the funds are actually paid to the garden, not the society.

A press release from Myddelton House Gardens, dated 28 January 2011 states:

Blooming marvellous


Prized snowdrop bulb fetches record breaking amount

A new record was set this week when a single Galanthus plicatus ‘E A Bowles’ snowdrop bulb was sold for £357 at auction.

Two thirds of the profits from the sale will go towards the current restoration project at Myddelton House Gardens, the original gardens and home of renowned plantsman and horticulturalist Edward Augustus Bowles. The Gardens were awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund Grant of nearly £500,000 in 2009 to return them to their former Victorian glory.

Andrew Turvey, Head Gardener, Myddelton House Gardens, near Enfield just north of London, said: “This is phenomenal news. We were ecstatic to find that one of our bulbs had fetched such a hefty sum – breaking the previous record for a single snowdrop bulb by £92. The profit received will go towards the completion of the restoration of Mr Bowles Gardens.”

Andrew continued: “It is timely as we will be hosting the Early Spring Flower Show at Myddelton House Gardens on Saturday 12 February, and we will be selling five of these prized bulbs. Bulbs are limited and will be sold on a first come, first served basis so we advise people to come early.”

This will be the first flower show in the Gardens since Mr Bowles’ death in 1954. The event runs from 12:00 – 16:00 and also includes a Snowdrop and Hellebore Guided Walk by a Senior Gardener, from 13:00 – 15:00. Booking is essential via www.leevalleypark.org.uk or 08456 770 600.

Myddelton House Gardens, Bulls Cross, Enfield, Middlesex, EN2 9HG, is part of the 10,000 acre, 26 mile long Lee Valley Regional Park. The Gardens boast a diverse plant collection, beautiful carp lake, conservatory, rock garden and a number of historical artifacts.
Myddelton House Gardens Early Spring Flower Show is being held in conjunction with the British Irish Society. It is the first flower show to be held within the Gardens since the death of Mr Bowles in 1954.


The prized bulbs have been multiplied by Monksilver Nursery.

Iris 'Scramble'

Iris 'Scramble'

The 2011 catalogue from Bob Brown's Cotswold Garden Flowers arrived a few days ago. As usual it is packed with all sorts of temptations, in all classes of plants - the definition of 'garden flowers' is splendidly broad.

One of the new introductions, appearing in commerce for the first time, is an Iris I selected a few years ago from a batch of seedlings raised from named clones of Sibirica irises, though unfortunately the label recording the maternal parent got lost. It is short and produces masses of large, pale bicolor yellow and rich cream flowers - scrambled egg colours, in fact. Although they are overtopped by a few leaves this is not a significant problem and a clump in full flower, as above, is a fine sight. Three years ago I gave a plant to Bob, who not only concurred that it was worth having but decided it was worth propagating too.


Emmanuel Saiko



I am hoping that it will prove popular and sell in large quantities, as Bob will pay me a small voluntary royalty on each plant sold in the first three years (it's not a protected variety, so anyone can propagate it). Any such proceeds are earmarked to help fund the Secondary School education of Emmanuel Saiko, a Maasai lad from 'my' village in Tanzania, who I am supporting.