Polemonium - Romanzoffia (excluding Primula)

Polemonium caeruleum 'Pam' £4
A sweet little white-variegated form, blue flowered and mildew free.
Polemonium foliosissimum 'Cottage Cream' £5
Tall, self-supporting creamy white variety. Very tall says Sarah.
Polemonium 'Hannah Billcliffe' £5
Notably large flowers, starting lilac and ageing to a pale pinkish, giving a bi-colored effect.
Polemonium 'Lambrook Mauve' AGM £5
Mauve flowers over an exceptionally long season in spring and summer. Tough, compact, slightly spreading, up to 50cm tall and not prone to mildew. This is a plant which is common for all the right reasons.
Polemonium 'Northern Lights' £4.50
Short (30cm), with nice clear blue flowers
Polemonium reptans 'Stairway to Heaven' £4.50
Cream variegated leaves purple tinted when young, and blue flowered. Apparently disease free! So good we had to swallow our old fashioned propagators' pride and buy in some plugs, since it is protected by the dreaded Plant Breeders' Rights.
Polemonium reptans 'Virginia White' £4.50
Pure white, and spring flowering. Remove flowering stems as they go over to encourage repeating. Not for very dry sites.
Polemonium 'Sonia's Bluebell' £5
One of the most distinctive and sought after of the many hybrid polemoniums. Elegant, rather nodding, cup shaped flowers in clear blue. It's the colour of the Scottish bluebell (harebell to us southerners) rather than the English Scilla. Less prone to mildew than many. Few.
Polemonium yezoense 'Purple Rain' £4
The purple-leaved Jacob's Ladder was done a great disservice by being distributed as a very variable seed strain. Having no truck with that sort of thing, we've obtained a really well coloured one and increased it by division. Leaflets smaller and more than in caeruleum, flowers more violet than blue.
Polygonatum cirrhifolium £4
Whorls of delicate leaves and nodding little lilac bells on slender stems to 45cm. Shoots erupt from creeping rhizomes so late in the spring you fear something's wrong, and flower within a fortnight. For a humusy soil in some shade.
Polygonatum x hybridum AGM £4.50
Another example of a plant which is common for the best reasons. This hybrid is the usual Solomon's Seal of gardens, in this clone quickly making a dense, almost weed-proof patch of elegantly arching flowering stems with all the grace of the species. About 60cm tall. No berries, unfortunately. For a rich, moist soil, best in light shade.
Polygonatum odoratum 'Flore Pleno' AGM £4.50
Classic Solomon's Seal, with interesting double flowers. 30cm here. It bulks up beautifully in a rich moist soil.
Polygonatum aff. roseum £4
A rarely seen miniature, with wiry 10cm stems and small leaves. The flowers are pinkish and nodding: the translucent red berries are a joy. Collected on Kanchenjunga years ago, and probably not roseum itself.
Polygonatum sibiricum DJHC 600 £4
Dan Hinckley collected seed from a plant in Sichuan, which had blue fruits, narrow leaves up to 12cm long, and which reached 3.9m in height through the lower branches of a larch. With us, the flowers are brown. These are divisions of one of the seedlings he raised. Quite how to make it grow this tall remains to be seen, but the ends of the leaves twist round as if they want to help it cling to other plants
Polypodium cambricum 'Pulcherrimum Addison' £6
One of the nicest mutant polypodies (there are hundreds, and we only want the nicest ones). The fronds are bipinnate, i.e. divided once more than normal, have quite a neat, substantial look and tend to be held quite upright. The young fronds are curved in at the edges. Very distinctive. Found on Whitbarrow, a massive lump of limestone above Morecambe Bay, in 1861.
Polypodium cambricum 'Richard Kayse' £5
Bipinnate, but much less so, and flat as anything, giving a lovely lacy effect. First found near Cardiff in the 17th Century and recollected in the late 20th century from the type locality, and is presumed to be the original clone. One of the first we grew, having picked it out, quite naively, from Martin Rickard's erstwhile National Collection of the genus, without knowing its rarity and the great price it normally attracts (we learned that the hard way before we left).
Polypodium cambricum 'Prestonii' £8
This time the pinnae are lacerated, but not very deeply, are rather broad and overlap quite a bit. It's beautiful and very distinct from all the others we list. Came into cultivation by way of a nasty little bit of eco-vandalism by one of the old-time fern collectors, but all we can do now is cherish both the plant and the remaining limestone pavements of north-west England.
Polypodium  cambricum 'Falcatum O'Kelly' £6
Compared with all the others we list, the pinnae are almost entire, but curve round towards the frond apex, giving a narrow, forward-swept  outline to the arching fronds, which move in the wind more than others. Distinct and lovely. Originated in the Burren a century ago.
Polypodium glycyrrhiza 'Malahatense' £4
Bipinnatifid, sterile form of a North American species, found in British Columbia. They say the rhizomes taste sweet - I'm yet to be convinced.
Polystichum acrostichoides £4
The Christmas Fern of the American north east has distinctive narrow, coarsely lobed, rather upright fronds. Useful for cutting in winter. Moister shade.
Polystichum setiferum 'Pulcherrimum Bevis' AGM £4.50
You probably know the old classic, which commanded a big price from nurseries; you may have greened with envy at the way the Savill Garden could plant them, almost casually, by the dozen, to great effect. Without resorting to technicalities, the frond is very elegant, long and slender, nicely tapering, with well spaced pinnae. It produces offests, but not very freely, so the crowns get big and uncrowded, and the price stayed high. It's been tissue cultured, which is why you see it all over the place at ordinary prices now. It does not look quite right. Partly this is because the plants are quite small  (i.e. not 1m tall) when you get them, partly it's because they have lots of little crowns, crowded together, which over time you might want to separate - we've started doing this for you on these. But still, I think it's an open question whether they will look exactly like the original in the end (we do have old, pre-TC stock for comparison but not (yet) for sale). They do, however, look extremely similar, and they make very nice plants. These plants are from tissue culture. So now you know (maybe). P.S. almost nobody asks us for it, despite our price being competitive. Don't go imagining you're getting non-TC plants from anyone else unless they actually tell you so. Even then, you might want to ask them to swear it's not a division from previously tissue cultured stock. I'm not bitter...
Pulmonaria 'Benediction' £4.50
We've broken our 'no Pulmonarias cos nobody buys them' rule already. 'Benediction' is not only so very good - a rich true blue with nice round spots, it also remains quite hard to obtain.
Ranunculus acris 'Flore Pleno' £4
The fully double Meadow Buttercup is a safe, easy perennial for the more or less sunny, not too dry border. Few.

Ranunculus ficaria cultivars
These are Lesser Celandines, which can be a bit invasive.
Just making sure you knew.
Ranunculus ficaria var. aurantiacus £3.25
Rich orangey fowers, leaves marked silver and black.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Elan' £3.25
Pale yellow petals, regular double.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Jake Perry' £3.25
Pale lemon, grey backed single flowers contrast well with black-purple tinted leaves. Very telling when caught by a ray of early spring sunshine. Wendy 'Bosvigo' Perry's
selection.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Ken Aslet double' £3.25
White, grey backed petals, regular.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Modern Art' £3.25
Unusual wavy outline to the leaves - they look almost lobed. Rarely seen. Thanks to Ruth Boundy.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Ragamuffin' £3.25
A seriously weird mutant, a full double in which the 'petals' are thick and leafy in texture, yellow and dark green. Strangely attractive.
Ranunculus ficaria 'Witchampton' £3.25
Silver mottled leaves, ordinary yellow flowers.

Ranunculus repens 'Snowdrift' £3.75
This time very heavily white-variegated. Shyer flowering, less vigorous, but even so...
Rheum kialense £4 FROM SPRING 2010
Big needn't be best in the rhubarb world. This dinky species rarely gets above 40cm in height, is always pretty, but I love it best just before the flowers open in spring: the inflorescences look like white sausages dotted with red. Sun, reasonable drainage: and don't put it in a crumble.
Rodgersia aesculifolia AGM £5
Splendid horsechestnutty foliage, white flowers. To 1.5m when established. Moist soil.
Rodgersia 'Buckland Beauty' £5
Big bold leaves, flowers a strong clear pink, going over to dark red. One of the very best.
Rodgersia pinnata 'Superba' AGM £5
Bold foliage, bronzy pink when young, red tinted later, and bright reddish pink flowers on red stems. Very lovely, for moist soil in sun or part shade. Take note, ye who care, these are divisions, not the variable seedlings so commonly offered.
Rodgersia pinnata L1670 £5
Roy Lancaster's Chinese collection, with typical pseudo-pinnate leaves (unlike the palmate leaves of  'Superba') yielded several subtly different seedlings at Spinners. Divisions of them all were at first circulated, before it was realized that one seedling had better colouration than the rest - it has now been named 'Jade Dragon Mountain': we have it, but it's on a sabbatical year. The plant we offer this year came from one of the earlier distributions. It looks extremely similar, with red-pink flowers ageing to deep red on good red stems.
Rodgersia podophylla 'Rotlaub' £5
This species is valued for the distinctive large leaves, with 5 to 7 big, blunt ended, jaggedly toothed leaflets arranged almost as a circle. It spreads freely in moist shade to form dramatic clumps. 'Rotlaub' is an Ernst Pagels selection with red tinted leaves.
Rodgersia podophylla 'Smaragd' £5
As above, but with dark green leaves and airy inflorescences of white flowers. Pagels' again.
Romanzoffia tracyi £3.75
Tidy cushions of dark, shiny round green leaves all through winter and spring. Lots of pure white flowers in spring. Summer dormant. Easily spread by lifting its small tubers when dormant. It comes from moist cliff habitats on the Western seaboard of the USA, and appreciates a moist, well drained soil in at least partial shade. Easy, and like nothing else.