Astrantia - Cardamine

The Masterworts are classic perennials for heavy ground, thriving in sun or part shade. All have dense umbels of tiny flowers, surrounded by a conspicuous collar of bracts and looking for all the world like a large, single flower. All reach around 60cm.
Divisions.

Astrantia 'Buckland' £3 / £4.50
Very attractive hybrid, with large pink and green flower heads - like all Masterworts, great on heavy ground.

Astrantia major involucrata 'Shaggy' £3 / £4.50
Plants in pots never look their best. Once really established in fertile soil with reasonable moisture all year, the green-white bracts are really long, making a spectacular large false flower. These are divisions from Sarah's Mum's excellent plant.

Athyrium 'Branford Beauty' £3.25 / £4.50
Beautiful hybrid Lady Fern, vigorous and with a grey cast to the leaf. Deciduous.

Athyrium filix-femina var. angustum 'Lady in Red' £3.25 / £3.75
Another good, distinctive Lady Fern, light green fronds with a red rachis (the stalk/midrib bit...).

Athyrium filix-femina 'Minutissimum' £3 / £3.50
Adorable little Lady Fern, less than 20cm tall, but perfectly formed, and making a dense, spreading clump. Ignore Martin Rickard's disparaging comments - these are not dodgy Dutch imports which end up tall but divisions of the plant we've cherished throughout our gardening career, originally from Washfield. The epitome of mini-ferniness.

Athyrium filix-femina 'Victoriae' £3.50 / £4
One of the classic rarities, we offer divisions of established tissue-cultured plants, very close to the ultra-slowly splitting original (which was found by someone named Cosh - just thought I'd share that with you). Avoding mutant fern technicalities, the frond is long, narrow and almost parallel sided, the divisions are narrow and bracken-like, branching into little fingers at the tips, as does the tip of the frond. Undoubtedly weird and unnatural, but holds a peculiar attraction.

Athyrium 'Ghost' £3.50 / £5
On the same lines as 'Branford Beauty', but the metallic grey is more pronounced - stunning.

Athyrium niponicum var. pictum AGM £3 / £3.50
Classic easy silvery-grey leafed fern, with a mauve tint around the veins. Deciduous. 30cm.

Athyrium otophorum var. okanum £3.25 / £3.75
Semi-evergreen yellowy green fronds with red rachis. 50cm, some shade, not too wet or dry. Very pretty.

Baptisia australis £3 / £4
Indigo flowers on mounds of grey-green foliage in summer. Plant it and leave it. Sun.

Begonia boliviensis £3 / £4
Something to grow in a pot by the house or, as we do, in the conservatory. It arches out in all directions, with elegant bright orange flowers in summer. Store the tubers frost free in winter. Quite a novelty, and impossible to miss.

Begonia palmata £3 / £3.50
An extraordinary, apparently hardy, Chinese species. Thoroughly winter-dormant, it has big palmate leaves held 30cm above the ground on translucent red petioles. Plenty of pink flowers in late summer. A much more substantial plant than B. grandis ssp. evansiana.

Bergenia 'Beethoven' £3 / £4.50
Densely packed white flowers with a fetching hint of pink.

Bergenia ciliata £3 / £4.50
Has hairy dinner plates for leaves; wonderful pale pink flowers in February. Pretty hardy, but hard frosts can mash the flowers, so choose a sheltered site.

Bergenia emeiensis £3.50 / £4
A little sweetie from Western China, white flowers from pink calyces and small leaves. Compact and under 30cm in height.

Bergenia pacumbis CC3616 £3.25 / £4.50
Related to ciliata; very big leaves edged with hairs and pink flowers.

Bergenia 'Rosi Klose' £3 / £4
Deservedly mass-marketed, for once. Very free flowering, bright pink to 30cm.

Bergenia stracheyi Alba Group £3 / £4
Smaller species, white flowered and compact.

Bergenia tianquanensis £3.25 / £4.50
One of the least often seen Chinese species, this plant makes handsome rosettes of rather upstanding obovate leaves. We'll be honest, we've had it growing healthily for 5 years and it's never flowered.

Blechnum chilense £3.25 / £4.50
A very handsome large fern, evergreen with tough, glossy pinnate fronds. Bold and somewhat spreading, 1m or so in height. Hardy in southern and western areas, pretty good even in the Midlands, it seems, especially if mulched. Acidic or neutral soil.

Bletilla striata £3 / £4
An easy, large flowered, clump forming hardy orchid - what could be nicer? Bright green, pleated leaves and vivid pink flowers, dying back to tubers in winter. Recommended for humus rich partial shade, but can thrive in full sun or heavy soil.

Bletilla striata 'Albostriata' £3.25 / £4
The same again, with a somewhat variable white stripe to the leaf margin and flowers a much more delicate lilacy pink.

Bletilla striata var. japonica f. gebina £3 / £4
And again, this time white flowered with a pink flush inside.

Bomarea edulis £3 / £4
A herbaceous, climbing Alstroemeria.which can reach 2m or more in a season, with tubular dull red flowers, yellow and green inside, in late summer. Dies down to edible tubers tasting cucumberish.

Brunnera macrophylla 'Betty Bowring' £3 / £3.50
Bold summer foliage and white forget-me-notty flowers in spring.  Spreads in a shady site, ideally not too dry.

Brunnera macrophylla 'Jack Frost' £3 / £4
In this fine form the main veins of the leaves are picked out in silver. This effect lasts all year. Blue flowers. Protected by Plant Breeders Rights, unfortunately.

Brunnera sibirica £3 / £4
A hardy rarity. The blue flowers are much like B. macrophylla. Different bold leaves and running habit.

Bulbinella nutans £3 / £3.75
Winter growing bulb: bold dense spikes of lots of small yellow flowers in early spring: takes just a little frost.

Caltha 'Honeydew' £3.25 / £4.50
The hybrid marsh marigolds are desirable things, vigorous and floriferous, and scarce in the nursery trade since they have to be propagated vegetatively. This one is a clear pale, but not very pale, yellow, rather larger in flower than palustris var. palustris, the usual garden form. For moist to wet ground in sun or shade.

Campanula persicifolia 'La Bonne Amie' £3 / £3.50
Semidouble white, not as tidy a flower as the old ones but it does grow…

Campanula takesimana 'Beautiful Trust' £3 / £3.50
Freaky mutant whose white corolla is a bell split to the base into five long, narrow petals, and hanging.

Campanula takesimana 'Elizabeth II' £3 / £3.50
Large, double pinky-purple spotted bellflowers. 60cm.

Campanula trachelium 'Bernice' £3 / £3.50
A good violet blue double, stiffly upright to 50cm. Clump-forming rather than widely spreading. Sun or part shade but avoid winter wet.

Campanula 'Van Houttei' £3 / £3.75
Very big, dark blue-purple flowers. A very good plant. 75cm or so.

Cardamine
Great plants as they are, we can't fill the catalogue with descriptions of plants which almost nobody wants to buy. We have small numbers of the following, at £3/£3.50, mostly dormant until spring and best left in pots, watered, until well into growth.
Woodlanders unless stated: diphylla 'Eco Cut Leaf' (nice leaves), glanduligera, quinquefolia. (Kew/Washfield flowering form), raphanifolia (big, bold, pink flowered, a beaut for the bog garden in spring), waldsteinii (really nice).